Hi,

I recently had a rod snap and punch a hole in the bottom of my motor. After looking over the cost to rebuild the engine I decided to buy a JDM motor. I purchased from ebay and the engine I received is heavily oxidized and not what was shown in the listing. I've complained to the seller who is assuring me that it is a good motor with only 50k miles on it. I told him I would look over my options but it wasn't what I purchased and I am looking at returning it. I'm only entertaining keeping the motor because the engine is sitting in my garage and I want to get the car back on the road. I decided to do a leak down test on the engine. The leak down test is suppose to be performed on a warm engine which I have no way of doing and the oil is drained from the motor except some residual oil. All of the cylinders appeared to be OK with ~22% leakage except the rear drivers side cylinder. I can hear air leaking past the intake valves. I've rotated the crank several times, pressurized the cylinder and sprayed a little intake cleaner on the valves to try and get them to seat but they are still leaking by. Both intake valves for that cylinder are leaking by. The air leakage is showing 27% which is still OK according to the leak down tester gauge but I find it alarming that I can hear it. Does anyone here have experience buying JDM motors and is this a typical condition? Is air leaking past the intake valves while the motor is cold anything to be concerned about? Am I better off having the seller get their motor and buy some place else? Thanks for any advice.

 

I've owned one JDM engine, and cosmetically it arrived looking totally normal. This wasn't for my Lexus btw but I would imagine it still applies.

 

I would return it and buy a good motor.
You dont want to have headaches later on.

What motor did you purchase?

 

My initial reaction is to re-check the description and make sure nothing untoward was going on there that I didn't notice before giving my money over.
The fact that you can hear it could be just carbon buildup, lightly used/grannied *GR-FSE engines tend to choke themselves out, the 2GR less so. My JDM 3GR was chopped out of the car with hedge trimmers and some apparent rage issues, covered with something like a big garbage bag, and left in a yard somewhere to think about what it did for a number of years. It's the luck of the draw as to the cosmetics of the engine, but because of how Japanese car registration and vehicle deactivation processes go, the internals of a JDM engine are more likely to have significantly less wear on them than your typical North American vehicle. On my engine, just about every breakout from the main engine harness had an unusably mangled wire in it, and I'm still finding sensors that got damaged during extraction or transport. Alternator and AC compressor appear to be still serviceable, so those are freebies, and my plastic intake was cracked, but I gotta re-use my old one for the cold start injector, anyway...the block and heads are all I need, and they're perfectly fine, if not carb'd up from driving Ms. Daisy. Woulda been nice if they included the motor mount perches, but alas...gotta source another set or re-use our existing ones.

My point is, the long block you have will likely be perfectly fine for you to use and in better running order than an average NA market engine. Hose it down with some Corrosion-X if the cosmetics bother you.

 

Very little air should leak past the valves. That engine has a mechanical problem, maybe minor maybe not do you really want to install and find out the engine needs a tear down?

 

Thanks everyone. The motor was sent back. Now I just hope I don't run into any issues with getting my money refunded. There is a local seller near me that has JDM 4GR-FSE motors but their advertisement on Craigslist states that the engines have 175 psi of compression. The 4GR-FSE should have around 200 psi, right? I don't know how they compression tested them. It sounds like they were tested in Japan before being sold at auction. Does 175 psi sound OK?