Stuck lifter?
 

What do you guys think?



I'll be pulling the valve cover this weekend to inspect.

Time for a rebuild

Sadly, only 100K km (62K miles) on it.

Sounds like a stuck lifter to me.

62k on a 94? Chances are, she's been sitting for a while. I've done this in the past with other cars with stuck hydraulic lifters so bear with me here...

Get the engine up to temp if you can, then get a bottle of Seafoam and dump the whole ------- thing in the crank case. This will make it over full by a quart or so, but don't worry about that right now. Start the engine and let it idle for a while, 10 minutes or so. (If you don't have access to Seafoam, you can try this with Marvel Mystery Oil) This will thin things out quite a bit and it may get noisy, so don't ------- drive on it! After it gets warmed up, shut it down for an hour and let it heat soak into whatever is in there. Fire it up again to get things nice and hot, then change the oil and filter. Make sure its hot, you want that stuff flowin' out like gangbusters. Let it sit and drip a while too. Use a Mobil1 or other quality filter, this is important. If things look really really nasty during the oil change, you may want to change the brand new filter again after driving for a couple of days.

If this does not work and the engine is toast anyway, its only what, $25 and some time? I've had this work 9 times out of 10 for sticky lifters in old POS American cars. The ONE time I had this backfire on me was an engine that was completely sludged up with what I can only assume was old Penzoil paraffin sludge, but that motor was a lost cause anyway.

*Your mileage may vary, I'm not responsible, grain of salt, blah blah blah...

You can cut open the filter and check for bearing material to be sure, but that sounds like a collapsed HLA to me. You can Seafoam or 2Twisty flush the motor to help with that.

I do not even remotely miss the HLA drivetrain on NA8 motors.

e: Bottom end noises are much deeper in tone and get worse with RPM - the classic HLA noise is a bit more tappety and stays mostly the same as you rev the engine.

I've used ATF in the oil in the past with good results as well. The detergents in it help to clean things up similar to the "seafoam" trick. But ATF doesn't require an immediate oil change. I typically drive for a good half hour or more to let it work its magic.