Amazed at how clean valvetrain is (pics)

[Crashsector]

165,000 miles on stock EJ22. I've only had the car since about 143,000 miles and I had no clue how the first owner took care of it. After doing the head gaskets on what I now realize was a really horribly taken care of Forester, I was expecting a minimal amount of sludge, maybe dark stains on the inside of the valve cover at least. I was shocked when it looked like this:





Needless to say I've worked on engines with half the miles that looked a ton worse than that. After an hour or so of scrubbing with Engine Brite and purple degreaser, the valve cover gaskets were replaced. I went a little overboard cleaning.







This post brought to you by the "my parts didn't show up for my primary project so I dicked around with other little things because I set aside the time anyway" foundation.

--Andy

[Legacy777]

You can never have things too clean

[ggbox69]

I experienced the same thing when I did my swap and changed the cover gaskets. The engine had about 136,000 on it and everything looked new, I was amazed. One of my mechanic friends said the previous owner must had been religious about oil changes.

[Bheinen74]

When i pulled a valve cover to fix a hla on now McBrats 94SS, the inside of the valve cover was shiny still, no sludge, it was clean clean...160k or something like that.