How to: Subaru EJ25 SOHC Timing Belt Replacement

today I'm going to be showing you guys how to change the timing belt and the water pump on a single overhead cam ej25 behind me we have a lovely little Forester that we're going to be doing this job on so it's really not as bad as a lot of people think when it comes to doing timing belt jobs on Subaru single overhead cam engines are significantly easier easier than dual overhead cam because you only have two cam sprockets versus having four so it really shouldn't be that bad if you're going to be doing this at home so this is our specimen in question today this is a naturally asked seed ej25 uh the Foresters are a little funky with their radiator setups cuz they typically tend to sit a little bit taller and the engines tend to sit a little bit lower so you have these hoses that wrap down to the engine down there so what we need to initially start with before we even get into the timing stuff we need to drain coolant out of this pull the radiator out of the way and then get down and get the serpentine belts off for the alternator and the air conditioning once we have those out of the way then we can start removing the crank pulley removing the timing covers and getting all that out now for parts we are using as's tkf 001 kit a lot of people seem weary of these as kits but these as makes all of the parts for Subaru when it comes to timing stuff the tensioners the pulley the water pumps it's all manufactured by as still has the Japanese stamp on it Subaru just buys it directly from as and then rep puts their logo on it as also gives you this lovely little sheet with their timing belt kits I will link this kit down below for any other single overhead cam engine owners out there who may be doing this as well this kit will come with the routing for how to set up the timing belt how to align everything all of your torque specs for what you need to tighten down all your pulley to so it shouldn't be too bad for tools you're not going to need anything really major if you have impacts or anything like that you'll definitely want them you'll need a 3/8 torque wrench a 22 mm socket for the crank bolt uh an assortment of 10 12 14s a 17 17 mm wrench you may need a pop clip polar tool a 3/8 ratchet a small extension and that really should be it for what you're going to be needing to start things off let's get coolant out of this thing now if you look on the bottom of the radiator way down there you're going to see that little nipple right kind of where my finger at there should be a petcock coming off of that which is like a wing nut you loosen the wing nut that's going to let all the coolant come out of the radiator and we're just going to put it into this bucket we're not going to be reusing this coolant we are going to be replacing the coolant if you would like to reuse your coolant you definitely can but for us we will be replacing it so let's go ahead loosen up that petcock and get all the coolant out of this radiator so that way we can get that thing out of here okay that drain I want to loosen it all the way cuz it's going to make an absolute mess so I'm just going to kind of let it dribble dabble out for a couple minutes and then once some of the cooling's gotten out we'll pop off the radiator cap to displace the air in the cooling system and that should flow a lot faster I just try to mitigate the mess so while that's draining let's actually jump up top and get the serpentine belts off and start clearing out some room to get down to the timing covers have a cover on your pulley setup you're going to want to remove it this one has a 10 mm here right in the middle and then there's one more right over here that I'm going to have to grab take that guy out of the way get this serpentine belt off for the alternator what we are going to do is go ahead and if you lift up the belt right here you're going to see a little bolt right where my finger's at and that's going to be your tension bolt for keeping the alternator bolted up so we're going to loosen that don't need to take it off then you've got this guy right here which we already loosened and then you're just going to drive this and loosen this and it's going to drive the alternator down once the alternator is driven down enough you can go ahead and just pull this first belt off like that for the AC belt you're going to have this little tension guy right here so if you look down here all the way down there you're going to see a 12 mm nut and you're going to see a 12 mm bolt right here you're going to loosen that bottom 12 mm nut then you're going to loosen this and that's going to pull tension off of this guy then once we have the belt out of the way we're going to loosen up these two 12v holding this bracket to the block get that out of the way and then all of our belts will be free from there then we can kind of focus back on the radiator we are going to have to disconnect the fans for this which is going to be one clip located on this side on the side of the radiator and then another one on the side of the radiator on the driver side underneath of this coolant overflow the car was just driven here so this is still hot but it's got a pressure relief so it shouldn't spray or anything like that and it should all just come out of the petcock just like that if your car has been running it is hot and you don't have any way of pressure relieving the system do not open this you will spray yourself and you're not going to have a fun time so now that we have this off we're going to let that continue to drain and pop off these two radiator hoses up top we have two on the bottom also and then we'll take out these radiator stays and get this radiator out of here I have learned with these clamps don't use electronic tools for these I have seen these strip so many times and always put the clamps back on the same spot where you found them and where you took them off pull off this radiator hose all right pull off this other radiator hose which is arguably going to make a mess come up here undo the radiator stays the power steering line kind of up and out of the way we should just be able to pull this guy up and out just like that so with our radiator out of the way you can see we have a ton more room in here to be able to get at things now so now we can easily remove our AC pulley get our crank pulley off and then get our timing covers off and start changing timing there is that guy and then we can take off this so when you get to the crank bolt if you ever got a spot where it feels like it's stuck or you can't get it off one trick you can do normally I just zap them off one trick you can do is you can put the car in the highest gear and break it free that way you're not going to cause any damage the car will be fine or company 23 does make a tool to be able to hold the crank pulley as well to make life a little bit easier for you but it can be stubborn normally I just use my electric impacts and for the most part it'll zap them off no problem she wants to come off you don't want to really you don't want to pry on it if you can avoid it I have a tool to pull it but for the most part you can kind of Wiggle them free a little bit there we go crank fulley off now we have access to our timing covers so with the timing cover uh for this car it's two pieces so we've got this big piece here and then on the driver side we have one small piece and it's just held on with some 10 ms so we're just going to take all the 10 ms off get the timing cover off then we can have access to the timing so if you come up in your engine bay here let me set up my flashlight in a way where it won't completely fall right on the crank sprocket you'll see that white line and if you follow it back you'll see that little indented line in the crank sprocket on the oil pump you're going to find another line that's very similar to that you're going to line those up over here on the timing cover you're going to see that little blue Mark there's an indented line there and then there's another one in the timing cover as you guys can see this one is off time by about a Toth same thing on that cam gear you're also going to see that there is a small line on it you're just going to line the lines up so now that we're in time we're going to go ahead and start pulling off timing components so I always start with that red pulley down there and then I'll pull off this one then I'll pull off the tensioner then I'll pull off the Cog then we'll take off the water pump and then we'll put the new water pump on with our new gasket and we'll start putting all of our new pulley on torquing them down get the belt on and pretty much do everything that we just did in the rever ver order to get this thing back together I said doing timing belt jobs on these aren't too bad it's just a little if you've never done it before I get it could be a little bit daunting start with the red pulley on the bottom come up grab this one go ahead and pull the belt off this engine came out of an automatic transmission car and the only reason you can tell is because there's no timing belt guides on manual transmission cars which is car is it's been swapped there is timing belt guides that hold the belt down so if you were to stall the car out or anything like that it's not going to jump timing so do keep that in mind it is kind of specific we had a small snag on this and this is why it matters when you buy a timing belt kit for a naturally aspirated engine turbo engine automatic transmission manual transmission on these naturally aspirated 2.5 L the automatic transmission cars came with oil coolers as you guys can see right down there there is an oil cooler on this car and they also did not come with timing belt guides so this engine came from an automatic transmission car it's been swapped into this manual transmission car and on the water pump specifically there is no provision on the manual transmission water pump for an oil cooler Port so with that being said I called the owner I talked to him I asked him hey do you want to just reuse this water pump no one local really had any in stock unfortunately so we couldn't just go get another one so the water pump feels fine it looks relatively newish I'm going to go ahead and clean up everything behind the timing cover here we're going to start getting everything else put back on the driver side cam was about a tooth out of time so we'll get that fixed as well get all new timing components on here and get this thing running strong again but that's why it does matter for manual transmission versus like automatic transmissions there are subtle differences on the engine that actually make the timing belt kits different so keep that in mind when you're going to buyer parts I'll link below manual transmission and Auto atic transmission timing belt kits for these naturally aspirated 2.5S try to clean up and smoo a little bit let's start getting our new pulley on brand new timing belt tensioner that'll go in right here our cogged pulley that'll go on the water pump right here we have our upper pulley here we need to bring it in time a little bit more right there you just want to make sure that all your guys are perfectly in time otherwise you're going to have a real bad day now this is one I wanted to talk about for a minute on the timing belt so these timing belts I see a lot of people get confused on them you're going to see indentations you're going to see well you're not see inations you're going to see marks on these on these marks never reference these for timing you are only going to reference these marks for installation and installation only the yellow dash line close to the wording is going to go on the crank shaft so that yellow line is going to be your crankshaft one if you come down the timing belt you're going to have a solid one right there that is going to be your driver side cam if you keep coming down the timing belt you're going to find another one it's going to be your passenger side cam these lines are going to line up with the timing marks on installation only after the car's been ran after you turn the car over to verify your timing marks never go off to the Belt again it will not give you any type of reference anymore the marks on the Belt are only for installation don't stress it you're going to go off the cams and the crank sprocket to make sure that you're still in time not the belt now we're going to start feeding our belt in here we're going to get it on the crankshaft to start with over the water pump and then come underneath of the Cog pulley here have to take this pulley back off come up here and get this guy on his home when you're going to put these pulley on make sure that the bolt is going in straight the last thing you want to do is cross thread one of these pulley bolts going in so take your time with it you're going to have to pull the belt up and over the pulley and Slide the pulley under the belt before you thread it in so that way everything is in line you're going to have to do that with both of the pulley on the passenger side of the engine do the top pulley first followed by the bottom pulley and you should be able to do it no problem like I said just take your time make sure the bolts are going in straight and make sure you do not cross thread anything you guys may have seen the order that we just did that kind of sucked but everything is still in time so let's actually torque all these down and then I'll kind of walk you through all of this goodness all that goodness pulley one 26 to 32 we're going to go 28 they're all 26 to 32 with the exception of the tensioner the tensioner is going to be exactly 29 we have our new timing in here so as you guys can see right here we are lined up with our black mark there as well as on the cam gear on the front I fixed this side so it's all actually in time now from the blue line to the yellow line all the way to the timing gear and then all the way over here on the crank everything else is still lined up so now that we've got all this in here we're going to go ahead and pull this little grenade pin out and that's going to tension the tensioner right there so we have everything torqued down grenade pin set I like to let it sit for a minute and then we'll turn the engine over a couple times to make sure that everything's still in time if it's all in time we can put our timing covers back on and start reassembling this engine keep these These are nice to keep around if you have to retension a tensioner in the future uh they just they work nice to be able to do it we're going to turn the engine over to make sure that we're all still in time we going turn it over twice try to go slow I have had an instance where the belt has jumped on a brand new setup because the timing belt tensioner wasn't fully tensioned right there and we are still in time baby so all of our timing marks still line up we got good tension on our belt here we have all of our pulley torqued down so at this point we can uh we can toss our timing cover back on gave our timing cover a quick cleaning get that guy set back on [Music] there cleaned up this timing cover as well beautiful with our timing covers back on we'll take our our crank bolt here put our harmonic balancer back on we can put our AC stuff on get this thing put back together Radiator in new fluid burp it go test drive it make sure it's all good should be solid after that so the tooth is face down there's that all right gu's good to go put our AC belt tensioner back on you ever get your belts mixed up your AC belt is going to be a four rib and your accessory belt for your power steering and everything is going to be a FD drive this back down helps to guide the belt on this as it comes down also tighten this guy up got to be careful with these pulley also if you overtighten it accessory Drive get our cover back on here everyone be stressing no need to stress don't worry about a thing go ahead and snake this guy down I'm going to bring this guy up put our radiator stays in upper radiator hose now I mentioned this earlier and it is honestly vitally important that you actually do this and that is put these radiator hose clamps exactly where they were exactly down to the T cuz it on it will genuinely make a difference in how the radiator hoses seal up by putting them back they kind of have like a memory to them if you're going to be reusing them so it is just important that they do go back in in the same orientation now all we have left is the lower radiator hose and the lower radiator fan then we can put some coolant in this thing burp it test drive it make sure it's all good and can pick it up now because we emptied the cooling system we now need to refill it so I use these fun little coolant funnels you get them on Amazon I'll link it below I also have a vacuum bleeder but don't really find a need for it one gallon this will probably take a little over two gallons I have the front end of the car jacked up right now just to try to get this point a little bit higher it's going to make burping it a little bit easier if you've never burped a car before I'll show you how to do it it's really not too hard what you're going to do is you're going to turn on the car you're going to let it run with this funnel on here filled up you're going to have the heat on full blast on defrost I don't believe it squeeze these hoses a will come out I guarantee it fill this up a little bit more and we are going to actually just go and start this thing so make sure it's in park or neutral depending on what you have we're going to let it run and you guys will see air bubbles start to come out of [Music] here and we're just going to sit here let it run till all the air comes out so we're essentially just going to let it come up to operating temp it'll probably run for a little while to get there but we just got to let it get up to 10 [Music] bubbles get out of there bubbles look at all those bubbles we need that thermostat to open to get all the bubbles out look at that look at them all look at them all look at all the bubbles look at all the bubbles so we're looking pretty solid no more bubbles coming out so we're going to give this radiator hose a Quick Squeeze stick this guy in put the factory cap back on we're going to take it off jack stands run it make sure that all coolant temps are still within reasonable spec for where they should be and then we should be done so with that that covers it if you guys have any questions on how to install a timing belt on a single overhead cam dual overhead it doesn't matter if you guys have any questions on any Subaru timing belt stuff feel free to reach out I'll do my best to get back to you and like I said I will link down below the tools and and the parts that we use to do this job but with that it's all I got for you guys on this one so if you like the video if it helps you out go a hit that like button turn your black blue green yellow purple silver sight and whatever color turns for you and if you're not already subscribed to the channel and you want to be able to put in one of these Corners no idea which one quite yet but with that I'll catch you guys in the next one so peace out homies [Music]

Channel: Smeedia

Views: 5,700

Keywords: Subaru, Subaru WRX, Subaru WRX STI, JDM Subaru WRX, Subaru BRZ, Scion FRS, Toyota GT86, STI, WRX STI, JDM STI, Subaru Youtuber, Smeedia, Subaru Youtube Channel, Tanner Smith, Smedia, Subaru STI Channel, Subaru STI Videos, Subaru Timing Belt, How to change Subaru Timing Belt, Subaru Timing belt replacment, SOHC EJ Timing belt replacment, Impreza timing belt, how to change timing belt, Timing belt replacment subaru, water pump replacment subaru, smeedia how to timing belt

Id: bowoDps8l88

Length: 21min 4sec (1264 seconds)

Published: Mon May 20 2024