blackwolf
Member Since: 03 Nov 2009
Location: South West England
Posts: 16858
 
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My view is that in this situation, and assuming that you have reason to believe it was a good engine when you bought it, you have two choices. Option one, the "do the minimum" option, is to fit it as is, change the fluids, crank it over to get the oil flowing without it firing, then start it and see how it runs. Option two would be to do a full strip and rebuild of the engine, renewing any parts that need it. This would give you a good engine of known condition, and is the only way you'll really achieve it.
I would go for option one if I intended to rebuild my original engine, in effect using the spare as a temporary unit. The advantage of this is that I would know the state of my original engine so could assess what needs renewing quite easily, which makes a rebuild more predictable in terms of time and cost.
I would go for option two if I intended the current spare engine to become a permanent feature of the vehicle, mainly because fitting it is enough work for it to be really tiresome if it turns out to be a dud.
I am actually in a similar position myself, since several years ago I had the opportunity to buy a 2.4 TDCi engine which was blowing blue smoke in quite a major way, and the original owner simply replaced it complete. I bought the smokey engine as a source of spares, since at that time we thought it likely that it had suffered from the infamous piston cooling jet "feature" that totally destroys 2.4 Defender engines! I then found that the turbo bearings were shot and the turbo was full of oil, so it is actually possible that the engine is sound and it was a turbo fault all along. As a result the engine has been promoted from "a source of spares" to "a spare engine", and now I have to decide whether to rebuild it ready to fit when needed (my Defender has done 250k miles on the original engine), or to fit with crossed fingers when the time comes and rebuild the original engine. Actually I am considering option three, which is rebuild the spare now, ready to fit, then rebuild the original when it finally comes out and keep as the next spare!
Decisions, decisions!
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11th May 2020 12:32pm
