Hello all,
I owned an 89 lx 5.0 convertible about 8 years ago...and the itch has hit again. I was only in high school then and I did a lot of work on the car, but being it was my first car I ever worked on and I was a dumb kid I didn't do things as properly as I should and the car became very undriveable as a daily driver.
So I want to do things a little differently this time. I want to start by really checking the car I buy carefully. I am looking at a few cars around my area that are around 80k miles, not heavily modified and are well kept up.
There is one in particular I like, it looks very nice and he has just rebuilt the engine. He said the reason for this was "one of the spider claps that hold the lifter had broke, and it was letting the lifter roll on the cam. I could of just replaced the lifters and cam because the car was still running good just making noise. I didn't want to take any chances with metal being in the motor so I went the rest of the way through it."
I asked him if he did a compression check and leak-down test after he went through the engine and he told me that there is no need to do these tests since it is a stock motor.
To me it seems like if you have the motor open that once its closed back up its good to do these tests, no matter if its restored to stock or not.
I am weary that he messed up his rebuild and thats why hes selling it. Can you guys give me your opinion on this?
Thanks much,
-Jason
I owned an 89 lx 5.0 convertible about 8 years ago...and the itch has hit again. I was only in high school then and I did a lot of work on the car, but being it was my first car I ever worked on and I was a dumb kid I didn't do things as properly as I should and the car became very undriveable as a daily driver.
So I want to do things a little differently this time. I want to start by really checking the car I buy carefully. I am looking at a few cars around my area that are around 80k miles, not heavily modified and are well kept up.
There is one in particular I like, it looks very nice and he has just rebuilt the engine. He said the reason for this was "one of the spider claps that hold the lifter had broke, and it was letting the lifter roll on the cam. I could of just replaced the lifters and cam because the car was still running good just making noise. I didn't want to take any chances with metal being in the motor so I went the rest of the way through it."
I asked him if he did a compression check and leak-down test after he went through the engine and he told me that there is no need to do these tests since it is a stock motor.
To me it seems like if you have the motor open that once its closed back up its good to do these tests, no matter if its restored to stock or not.
I am weary that he messed up his rebuild and thats why hes selling it. Can you guys give me your opinion on this?
Thanks much,
-Jason