Honda K Series Fail, What Went Wrong?

greetings viewers merit the car guy here remember in the comments when you were asking me what went wrong with the k-series engine in the honda element that i just bought it had no compression in cylinder number two well if you had that question or if you're just curious about this k-series engine on this stand before me stay tuned for those that are curious this is a k24a1 so it's a 2.4 liter k series engine from honda now this engine came in a 2005 honda element that i recently purchased and i purchased it with a blown engine in fact i found that cylinder number two had zero compression to it and when i pulled the rest of the spark plugs they all had signs of burning oil so for me that was all i really needed to know this engine was going to go however i did a leak down test but i really didn't care if the cylinder was at top dead center and i probably should have so that leaked down test is probably not so valid but like i said i had already determined that i was going to replace the engine as soon as i saw the spark plugs and had no compression in one of the cylinders i'm going to begin my teardown in a place that you're probably not expecting my new oil filter cutting tool works just like a tubing cutter you just run the little thing in until it's cut all the way through and then you can take the bits out be careful you don't want to cut yourself making a mess that's probably going to happen no matter what i poured out the oil on the inside and didn't really find anything interesting other than this which i believe keeps the filter element in place before i get too far i'll just look and see if there's stuff in here and there's a chunk of something i don't know what that is it looks kind of like a little bit of yellow paint really i'm not sure if that's metal or or what it is could be just part of the filter from when i cut it off but i don't see anything in here that sticks out and says i'm your problem for some reason this is all slippery i'd say this is a good filter it's got like lots of filtering bits let's see if we find anything inside the filter media let me spread it out looking for tiny bits of metal remnants of the failure that's what i'm on the hunt for looks like the filter was doing its job and likely wasn't on there very long it doesn't look like there's hardly anything in here actually the oil filter did tell us something there isn't a catastrophic failure in this engine or at least i don't believe there to be there's just something causing no compression and i'm starting to wonder if maybe i've got a burned exhaust valve anyway next step is going to be to get the cylinder head off of here in order to do that we have to uh undo the timing chain so we're going to remove the timing cover and everything else here now start by removing this uh crank pulley find me that way how do you like me now man honda you're awesome for doing that making sure you just pull these right off using a puller is just a pain in the backside i might be able to get away with just undoing the front oil pan fasteners and these are all 10 millimeter try to keep these in some kind of order in a way this video can also double as a timing chain replacement tutorial for k k-series honda engine nothing really out of the ordinary here this uh i believe is part of the iv tech system the valve cover was just sitting on there obviously just trying to keep the dirt out before i get too happy just in case goose starts to come out ah there you are they usually give you some place to pry on stuff trying to keep these in order feels like maybe that's got to come out this would be the crank sensor this engine looks amazing inside like for 180 000 miles it looks really sticky good in fact this engine looks so good inside i kind of want to preserve stuff so i'm going to take the plugs out this way i can rotate the engine around and put it at top dead center so when i reassemble it reassemble the timing chain it will uh be correct and this will also give you a look at the spark plugs i was talking about that in my mind condemn the engine is that brown crusty residue that's burning oil and it looks to be evident on all cylinders so this is going to allow me to rotate the engine much easier i'll just put everything in time everything is lined up now you see this line here between these two gears and then down here there's a mark you sort of see that little arrow on the block lining up with that dot so everything is as it should be so get this chain off of here these are 12 millimeter probably yeah i'm gonna have to take cams out to get the head bolts anyway we can just let that live there for a minute we just want to get the cylinder head off i'm going to leave this part of the intake attached i'm just going to disconnect this hose i think i'm going to leave the exhaust manifold on it too i don't really need to take it off and actually this made it really easy to lift this with my engine crane but we're gonna have to take all these cam retainers off take the cams out take the followers off keep everything in order so we can get down to the cylinder head bolts so we can remove that quick overview here as long as we're here uh these are oil passages for this intake camshaft and there was if you remember that solenoid on the front there the timing of this gear can change so this will rotate based on the oil pressure that's coming through here and feeding through the back of it so this thing is critically important don't take it apart and if you get codes for this a lot of times in fact the only thing i've ever seen is a worn timing chain so it wasn't necessarily this that was causing the problem a worn timing chain caused that and what ends up causing that at least from what i've seen is uh low oil so if you run these low on oil the timing chain could wear out prematurely i'm not seeing that here but anyway there's a quick little lesson on that and on the back here you've got two separate cam sensors and then these little bosses on the back of the camshafts so that way it can monitor what's going on up there i'm not really seeing too much that's wrong with this engine at least up to this point now i've got to get this assembly out of here it looks like i've got a couple of tens there fastener up here that's about it this one up here is a t5 it's not super common for these to have an issue at least not from what i've seen so this is somewhat of an anomaly that you find one that's bad and this has nothing to do with this so i'm just going to put this back in and snug it up it's like an oil passage wager there's a tool out there for this and there it is suddenly there it is i'm gonna do what i can to keep all this assembled already had one follower fall out i think this guy came right out of here i'm going to try to keep these all together and know that i cleaned my work table before i did any of this now i think we get that cylinder head off these are the fasteners that i'm going to go for oh i had another one fall out there glad i saw that without these the vtec can't kick in yo stay these are all the same length i'll be honest i don't know if they're torqued to yield i don't see honey using that a whole lot another thing about leaving this stuff on is it gives me a bit of leverage on the cylinder head oh there's another hose probably should take care of that these look good for the most part this looks like an old engine the valves also look pretty good in normal except for cylinder number two see how the exhaust valves are darker here than they are here so we definitely have a problem cylinder i'm just not seeing the obvious i guess definitely an issue here though somehow it's lost compression i think this is supposed to be here let's spin it over and watch the pistons move before i start spinning the engine around i thought i'd try something i put the spark plug back in cylinder number two and i'm just gonna fill it up with solvent and if the solvent leaks out then we know that the valves can't seal because if they can't hold this liquid there's no way that it can hold some air and we can also see where the solvent goes whether it goes into the intake or exhaust manifold and that will tell us a little bit more about where the leak may or may not be it's not rushing out and we'll just let that sit while we do our thing and like i said it'll it'll let us know where it goes now let's just rotate the engine around see what the pistons do if they move like they should paying particular attention yep number two moves so it's moving so connecting rod and everything is still good express expected piston slap for this mileage although it hasn't been that long and look how much of the solvent has disappeared now check down inside the intake runner and i don't see anything in here so i'm going to pop the exhaust manifold off real quick and see if i see anything down inside there which would lead credence to my theory of a exhaust valve that's not sealing properly there's some solvent that just leaked out so i think we found it check it out stripping right out of cylinder number two rest are dry obviously but yeah it comes right out of there so let's take those exhaust valves out oh yeah that's chunky it's cracked too all right let's check out the other one that one's okay it's just the one the difference between these two valves is pretty clear and this one here on the left is obviously the problem here's a look at the two valve seats i think you can tell which one was the problem child in fact it almost looks like that seat might be coming loose maybe it certainly doesn't look good here's something i want you to note though you see these fuzzies on the exhaust valve same thing with spark plugs that's burning oil so fuzzy stuff like that the fuzzy crusty the brown fuzzy crusty that's oil being consumed there's something else i want to share with you about these valves so they're damaged but there's something else i think you should also see and this is the valve that was in here but you can see with it almost down there there is a significant amount of movement in this valve here and that usually indicates a warm valve guide the valve wears too but mostly it's valve guides that will wear so it's not just a valve replacement it could be just a valve replacement but to truly recondition this cylinder head valve guides should probably also get some attention a really great question that i should answer before i end this video is what could cause an exhaust valve to burn up like this and in my experience what causes this is the valve remaining open for too long and over time that excessive heat builds up and basically chews the valve up like what you saw here in this video and eventually you lose the seal now with honda engines in particular honda's do not use hydraulic valve trains for the most part they don't on this case series it does not it has what's called a solid valve train which means that they don't use any type of hydraulic uh tap it or lifter in order to activate the valves there's basically a solid connection between the two and periodic valve adjustments are recommended in order to maintain the proper clearance on this valve what can happen over time is as this the exhaust valves in particular wear they wear up at the top along the seat here and they sit farther and farther down inside the cylinder head but this clearance between this and the cam follower on top gets smaller and smaller as a result this valve can hang up for long periods of time or longer than necessary and burn up like what you've seen here today so to prevent this from happening periodic valve adjustments are recommended i would say on this maybe every hundred thousand miles or so to check it this engine had about 184 000 miles on it so maybe it never had a valve adjustment in that time or what is also maybe even more likely is somebody did a valve adjustment and adjusted the exhaust valve or this particular exhaust valve too tightly and if the valve clearance is too tight if there's almost no valve lash this is what can happen so there's a couple of different ways that it can happen but the most likely cause in my experience is people that aren't experienced adjusting valves and they end up with this anyway that's how i think this got that way now the cylinder bores do show some signs of wear those dark areas are a good indication of that the crosshatch areas are how the cylinder likely looked when the piston went in when it was assembled but these dark areas depending upon how deep they are would indicate whether or not that this cylinder could be reconditioned with a hone or perhaps it needs to be bored out to a larger size if it's really really far gone it'll have to be re-sleeved once again this goes back to careful measuring to try to figure out how to proceed with reconditioning this engine but at the very least it needs a hone and cylinder rings possibly a reborn new pistons to go along with it we can probably look at this tear down and say eric why didn't you just do a proper leak down test and replace that one exhaust valve and be done with it well that is a real possibility but it doesn't address the oil consumption issue that i'm seeing throughout the engine those valve guides being worn the way they were can accelerate the oil consumption additionally the worn out cylinder walls don't really know precisely how worn they are but even so they look like they need some attention as well so that means you know possible well definitely piston rings a little bit of machining work possibly some pistons uh some valve guide work and probably should go through and do all the valves in that cylinder head just to make sure everything was right all of that to get done to get to where i already am with a new engine in my element for me that was buying time replacing the engine bought me time this engine still is rebuildable in my mind yet i'm not really the person to do that i don't see myself doing it i had considered for a time taking this engine and building it and putting it into the silver civic i have out front that's left over for when i remove the engine from that to put into my son's 1999 civic i don't think this is the right engine for that k24 a1 engines in elements are not always the best choice for this they're they're not really the performance oriented version of the k series and if you want to make speed or power well that's the direction you would go however super reliable despite the fact that this thing had its issues it still ran and drive you know so there is that anyway to that end i have an idea rather than just throwing this away and scrapping it all together i'm going to give it to one of you i'm going to put my email address down in the description and the first person to email me and say that they're going to come and get it that's the big thing you got to be able to come and get it because i'm not shipping this anywhere so if you come and get this engine i will give it to you i'll box it up keep everything all together and make sure that well you can reassemble it have a running engine if you want it like i said my email will be down in the description i'm also going to put links in the description to additional information and videos that pertain to this whole thing uh i will also put a link to ericthecarguide.com which is where i ask you go if you have automotive questions other than that thank you so much for watching today i hope this was educational informative and fun was for me anyway be safe have fun stay dirty i'll see you next time you

Channel: EricTheCarGuy

Views: 156,158

Rating: 4.9656262 out of 5

Keywords: K series, Honda K series, K series fail, K series tear down, K series engine, Honda engine, Honda, 2.4L, Honda 2.4L, K24A1, VTEC, iVTEC, valves, pistons, timing chain, K series timing chain, Honda timing chain, camshaft, rocker arm, roller rockers, Honda Element, engine tear down, failure analysis, how to video, automotive how to video, automotive education, #ETCGVideo, how to auto repair, EricTheCarGuy, Eric the car guy, ETCG

Id: 23mlAV5eVP8

Length: 19min 32sec (1172 seconds)

Published: Fri May 14 2021