What Paul said.

Ask anyone who has done conversions for a living and they will tell
you some good stories about "low mileage" JDM motors. Two people that
come to mind are Marco at Buslab in Berkeley and Seth at Mastercraft
in Santa Barbara. Seth finally gave up on anything used including JDMs
and used only rebuilt motors in his conversions and don't get Marco
started about some of the JDMs that have gone bad on him.

Ditto as well on the stupid smog rules in California. The latest
debacle seems to be that the window for the SVX might be closing
because somebody in Sacramento has decided to make the refs enforce
the "manual tranny" rule for the SVX. The car was only produced with
automatics. Doh.

Jeff

On Dec 27, 2009, at 12:25 PM, Automatic digest processor wrote:

> Date:    Sun, 27 Dec 2009 15:20:39 -0500
> From:    Paul Guzyk <paullist08@GUZYK.COM>
> Subject: Re: Subie engine prices
>
> Actually the OBD2 wiring harnesses are easier to modify for Vanagon
> use than the OBD1 2.2 harnesses (ask anyone who has done it)
>
> 2.2 non-interference is a plus.... but as long as you change the
> timing belt at the required interval you should not have a problem
> with 2.5's, and Subaru sells a "California" timing belt good for
> 110k miles so you don't have to do it very often.
>
> Finally "low mileage" JDM engines are a bit of a scam...many of the
> ones sold by the importers have many more miles (or problems) than
> stated...and there is no way to verify true mileage since you cannot
> "carfax" a JDM engine.   I've seen "30k mile" JDM engines that burn
> oil like they have 200k on them....bottom line, YMMV/buyer beware
> with JDM engines...