About 6 months ago I bought a 2006 Subaru Outback from a coworker. It had a nasty knock in the engine and sounded like utter crap!! The car is in great shape inside and out, has about 185,000 miles on it and just needs a new engine. $600 for nice clean car with a bad engine… I’ll take it!! This will be a great project for my Son and I to work on, well he is gonna do the work and I am gonna tell him what to do. After all it is his car.
After struggling to keep it running and backing it into the garage, we put it on jacks and drained the coolant and oil. The coolant looked good and clean and the oil didn’t look like it had any coolant in it. I’m really curious what happened to this motor.
We disconnected and removed the battery
Then removed the serpentine belt and pulled the alternator off
A way to save a little money when doing this is to pull the power steering pump and tuck it off to the side. That way you don’t have to play the game of refilling the power steering fluid and getting all the air out of the system.
Another way to keep a little coin in your pocket is to do the same to the A/C compressor. Keep everything connected and just remove it from the bracket that holds it on the engine. Then just tuck it away where the battery used to be. That way you don’t have to pay to get your A/C refilled.
Remove the upper and lower radiator hoses and pull the radiator out. This gives you room to slide the engine forward off of the transmission. We don’t want to damage the radiator or the cooling fans.
I forgot to mention all the plastic air intake parts that need to come off. Hey, when my boy and I are working stuff just starts flying off the engine. Lol.
There are only a couple of electrical connections for the O2 sensors on the exhaust, the main harness plug and a couple grounds to remove. A couple of vacuum lines and the supply and return fuel lines. This little engine is just about ready to come out.
This Subaru has a manual transmission and there are 4 bolts of each side that need to be removed. This will separate the engine from the transmission.
After removing the motor mount nuts this engine was ready to get torn out of the ol’ Subi. It’s time for the engine hoist.
There are 2 rigging points on this little 4 cylinder boxer engine. One on the driver side front and one on the passenger side rear of the engine.
Once the engine was rigged up we started lifting it. The motor mounts are studs so you have to get them high enough to clear the holes.
After a little wiggling and shaking, the engine slid off of the transmission. Then we could jack it up to clear the front of the car get this engine outta there!
To make it really easy to tear this engine down we put in on an engine stand. It allows you to rotate the engine keeping your working area easily accessible.
This engine had a horrible knocking noise and you could barely keep it running to get it in the garage. I believe it has a bad cylinder but we will find out when we test it down a bit.
I do have another engine coming that only has 60k miles. It’s a Japanese import engine. So when it gets here we are gonna put in on another engine stand and see what parts need to be moved from the old engine to the new engine. One part I know needs to be transferred is the aluminum intake piping on top of the engine. It must have something to do with emissions because the crank case vent tubes go to different locations.
Anyway, when that new engine gets here we plan on giving it a good once over. Head gaskets and bolts, waterpump and timing belts, new clutch and flywheel, oil pan gasket, rear main seal, spark plugs and wires… This car should last my son a very long time when we are done.
Stick around and follow along as project Subaru progresses and we get this 2006 Subaru Outback back on the road.
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