Absolutely no wear or even light scratches on the thrust side of the bore and you can still perfectly see the factory honing marks. You could clean this up with a few strokes of a ball hone and put it right back into use and it would work perfectly!
Although it is bad to run a gasoline-powered car in this sort of short hop drive cycle, this shows it’s way worse to run an E85-powered car like this in the same scenario. The lesson here is to make use of your flex fuel sensor and run gas if you do a lot of stop-and-go driving. Also, run an even shorter oil change interval, maybe from the looks of this, every few hundred miles. Once a week take a nice long drive to drive all the water off of your oil. Disconnect your oil cooler if you do this sort of stuff all the time. Hook it up for track use. If you still insist on running E85 in city driving, run a tank of gasoline through your car every once and awhile.
What is a shame is that the engine technically was in great shape and if we had been more cognisant of what could happen and taken appropriate actions to prevent the sludge build-up, the engine would have been happy for many more miles. Knowing what we know now, we would have run on gasoline, changed the oil more frequently, and at least once a week, taken the car on a longer errand running drive to get rid of accumulated water in the sump. At least this engine will be rebuilt into a high-power configuration, much like what we did for Project GD STI, and live on in another car.
The lesson here is even when you think you know everything, you don’t.
15 comments
GD STi stands for for something else in this case, lol. Love your transparency with the EJ. I’ve pondered doing a straight E85 tune in my Subaru, but now I really don’t want to.
Thank you for more Subaru content.
Mike, what about the oil/lubricant additive some people put in alcohol fuels? Maybe using that with each tank of E85 would help prevent the wall wash down you experienced?
E.g. like this one:
https://www.amazon.com/19769-18-Additive-Alcohol-Cherry-Scented/dp/B0093DGPJ0/
https://motoiq.com/top-lube-for-e85/
So, she was already adding the oil additive and this still happened?
Fuel addtive
I’d recommend oil analysis if you really want to know what’s happening in an engine. It would have detected this contamination well before the point of being catastrophic and is more cost effective than frequent oil changes.
I don’t work for, nor am I compensated by, but have used Blackstone for 2/3 current cars and will do so for every vehicle in the future.
I told my daughter to change the oil every 1000 miles and if she did that it would have been ok.
Hi, excellent article.
Not just E85, driving an cold engine ruins it. It does not matter with E85, regular gas or diesel – the result is the same
E85 does it quicker via a different mechanism.
There are some oils out there that are extremely friendly with E85. Torco TR-1R comes to mind.
Looks like my Prius Prime oil cap during winter. As it will mostly run as an electric car, it uses the engine in short bursts when the battery is depleted. The oil definitely doesn’t like that so once or twice in a week, i run a 40 / 50 miles trip just to bring it at full operating temps. A non issue during summer as the battery has more then enough capacity for my errands and i use the good old (2012 witk almost 500k km on the clock) Civic Si more.
’07-’09 VW GTI’s were notorious for this because of bad thermostats. The dealership would tell people to take the car for a 60 mile drive once a week. Or change the stat yourself and everything is fine.
I saw some horrific sludge mess in engines at the dealership.
Pulled valve cover of a SBC in a Blazer, ticking lifters/valve train noise. The sludge was a perfect reverse mold of the valve cover with little opening for each rocker arm.
Seized BBC in a truck. Pulled oil drain plug, no oil came out. Removed oil pan, It was heavy, pan is full of congealed oil, but there is a hole in the oil, where the oil pump pickup was. Slide under truck and there is a tower of congealed oil sitting on top of the oil pickup screen. To this day one some one dumps out a can of cranberry sauce I think of this truck. We call this stuff “Can”berries. I can’t eat them.
Lastly there was the BBC that was gummed up so bad most of the pushrods would no longer feed oil up the the rocker arms.
All three got new engines.
Hi Mike,
I have a question, our STI is E85 and one injector get stuck opened. A good amount of E85 went to the engine oil. We are waiting for new injector, but what you recommend? Change the oil quickly? I dont know if the E85 in the engine oil can damage the engine.
Thanks,
Francisco
Change the oil before even driving it one bit.