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12 Posts
Well fellow Saturn owners, my 08 Outlook XR looks to be on her way out to the pasture. She's at the GM dealer in Bowie MD with an estimate of $6000+ for a new motor
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Basically, to make a long story short; it was time to change the spark plugs, in fact we were 10k over. I ended up getting these E3 plugs which were suggest by the advanced associate as "comp. replacements". Well, after putting them in... I got nothing but random misfires, and a slew of CELs. Apparently, a piece of one of the plugs broke off into the cylinder causing damage. The GM dealer initially diagnosed the random misfiring as an issue with the O2 sensor (p1174) then they thought it was an issue with the timing chain and injectors, lastly they thought it was a stuck valve. Well today all of that changed as they were going to replace the head and timing chain until the saw some piston damage (nothing major) and some scoring on the cylinder wall. They immediately reversed their initial claims and now has blamed the miss firing on the damaged piston and cylinder wall, and refused to do any work citing (non OEM) part being used. The strange thing is... After they cleaned the injectors and ran the tests the misfire went away but returned later that day. I wish I could post the pics of the small nicks in the piston, however last time I checked; the piston has nothing to do with the air/fuel mixture. Since they did a compression test and all were fine and equal, then a leak down and there were no gaps or leaks... How is the misfire attributed to a piston with small nicks on it? :
???
Anyway, $6k on a car worth only $5-7 at best? Not worth it to me...
Basically, to make a long story short; it was time to change the spark plugs, in fact we were 10k over. I ended up getting these E3 plugs which were suggest by the advanced associate as "comp. replacements". Well, after putting them in... I got nothing but random misfires, and a slew of CELs. Apparently, a piece of one of the plugs broke off into the cylinder causing damage. The GM dealer initially diagnosed the random misfiring as an issue with the O2 sensor (p1174) then they thought it was an issue with the timing chain and injectors, lastly they thought it was a stuck valve. Well today all of that changed as they were going to replace the head and timing chain until the saw some piston damage (nothing major) and some scoring on the cylinder wall. They immediately reversed their initial claims and now has blamed the miss firing on the damaged piston and cylinder wall, and refused to do any work citing (non OEM) part being used. The strange thing is... After they cleaned the injectors and ran the tests the misfire went away but returned later that day. I wish I could post the pics of the small nicks in the piston, however last time I checked; the piston has nothing to do with the air/fuel mixture. Since they did a compression test and all were fine and equal, then a leak down and there were no gaps or leaks... How is the misfire attributed to a piston with small nicks on it? :
Anyway, $6k on a car worth only $5-7 at best? Not worth it to me...