Here in sunny Southern California there happen to be a few salvage yards near the Mexican border that offer a decent price on complete engines if you remove them yourself. Last I was in their yard I found two Subaru Legacy's (untouched) that I was tempted to pull the engine from but I'm a little hesitant to do all that work just to find out the engine is junk.

Are there any signs or symptoms to look for on any of these salvage yard engines that would let me know to stay away from them? Oil marks in a particular place or anything like that?

Without doing a compression test it can be a bit of a gamble, but some other things to check is how caked up the inside of the PCV breather hoses/fittings are and the throttle body with oil and carbon

Also pull a couple of coolant hoses off and check the inside of the coolant manifold for crusty build ups.

My first EJ22 looked perfect from the outside and ran beautifully, but little did i know till the head gasket went that some point in a past life it had probably had cats piss in it for coolant which had corroded the inside of the block and heads

Dont listen to EMPI, he is still in the dark ages and likely still uses that record player

rig up a fuel line and a fuel pump and start it in the car , it will go if you get fuel and power to it


see if you can find a 22b motor there closed deck

Had to do some Googling to figure out what "closed deck" means. Suby engines tend to go pretty quick from the yards so I won't have much time to be picky about open or closed if I find more than one engine. Is there a way to tell if it's open or not with a code or something on the block? My plan is to pull the heads off in the yard to have a quick look inside so I can hopefully prevent the same hassle that Joel went through with his first engine.

Edited because I can't spell.

Hey Pickpocket, would you mind if I ask what yard you're going to? I have my ej20 but it did not come with the crossover exhaust pipe and need to find one for my conversion. It used to be that you could go down to the yards off of the 905 or off of Energy way and they could tell you who had what, last time I was down there no one seemed to want to refer someone to another yard.
Thanks

Get your crossover pipe from grimmspeed...they are in the states. The stock ones reduce in diameter and restrict flow.

Matt

Thanks for the grimmspeed info. My engine is from approximately 1993 JDM Legacy. Grimmspeed's site only showed an 02-05/08+ is there a difference? Mine has the stock exhaust minus the crossover. I could buy a new exhaust but haven't found one that says it will fit on an ej20 turbo from the early 1990's. Also, anyone have a line on a downpipe from the stock turbo or is that something else that I'll have to fab up? I plan to run a pipe to the rear and run dual quiet packs.
Thanks

Okay, upon more research on Grimmspeed, I see a spot where they state applications include a 91-94 legacy turbo for the crossover pipe. So this modifies my above question, 169.00 is alot to spend on one piece of an exhaust system to go into a stock 17 year old exhaust. At that point, I would rather buy a new exhaust system for the engine. I have seen them on ebay, but don't know if they will fit all of the different model EJ's. Usually they are listed for newer cars.

Thanks, I'll plan on checking it out after the holiday weekend. Hopefully I can find the exhaust parts I need.