Final bell for a Suzuki project I have sidelined

[Greywolf]

This video concerns a 1993 Swift I was working on bringing back from the dead. If you go back and look at the other videos I shot that led up to this one - you can understand why I bailed and went to find a guy I heard about locally that was heavy into Festiva cars. The Swift went from one serious fail right on to the next - and after researching the cylinder heads I realized I could get a whole running car for less than what it would cost me to get anywhere near having this bucket on the road.

*The cam journals in the head don't have any replaceable bearings.

This is also a test to see how to mount videos here for later on.

The bottom line is that THIS is the wretched heap that decided me on getting a Festiva


Hmm - looks like the back buttons for the other related vids never appeared. But I did guess right about being able to post the vid itself instead of just a link.

Good enough. The next vids I post won't be until I have at least one of the Festivas here and start cleaning them up.

[Eaglefreek]

I was actually looking for a Metro, Swift or Sprint when I originally was looking for a fuel efficient car for my long commute to the office because I owned a Sprint in the late 80's and knew they was reliable and got great MPG. However, I stumbled across a Festiva for a good price and glad I did. They don't seem to get as good of mileage as the Metro, but I really dig these cars.

[Advancedynamix]

Greywolf, welcome to the forum! From what I've seen, these Festivas are built a little more heavy duty than the Metro/swift cars. They are more fun to drive as well. With a few easy modifications, these cars can out handle modern sports cars.
I'm looking forward to more videos!

[bhazard]

The Swift/Metro/Sprint had a few minor advantages over Festivas.

1. MPG, you can't beat a Metro XFi for mileage period.
2. Factory performance models. Starting with the turbo sprints and then the 16 valve Swift GTI (101hp 1.3 liter)
3. Multiple body styles across 2-3 generations (3, 4, 5 door + vert)

Other than that it seems like they rot out in critical places more easily (front control arm).

And its easy enough to make a performance festiva.

[Greywolf]

This one had a pretty clean body, but OH MY GOD what the Prior Owner (PO) did to it!

His last great act of defiance was to dump a five pound bag of sugar into the gas tank...

I spent quite a bit and quite a while undoing that, including rebuilding the Throttle Body, cleaning out the tank itself, tracing blockages in several lines, etc.

~And when all that was said and done, I had an electrical problem between the injector and the EEC/ECM that had me running in circles for days.

Here's the list of the vid's I did on it:

[Greywolf]

I can only put one video in each post, so maybe I'll just drop the links after this so I don't get accused of spam.

[Greywolf]

I guess I need to figure out how to post the playlist somehow. Skipping ahead, this is where it wound up:

The cause led to what you saw above in the first post - the cam was binding up in it's journals because of failure to oil....

[sketchman]

The PO put a bag of sugar in it? What a monumental idiot.

Just curious. Why not swap a new engine in? I mean, when you get down to individual rebuilt parts it gets expensive, but you can generally get a whole different engine for a few hundred.

[Greywolf]

It would need an engine, transaxle, wiring harness+ECM for the engine (I wouldn't want to put the same kind of engine back in, there are 16V swaps for these too), and most important of all:

A running set of wheels to go get all of that...

[bhazard]

Now that you mention it I don't think any engine I've worked on has had cam bearings. Seems like more of a pushrod engine thing to me.

[Greywolf]

American V8's (Chevy, Ford, etc...) all have cam bearings. I've still got the original engine from my 89 Ranger which was a 2.3L - and a bad cyl head - but I never looked to see if they had bearings or not.

Since I was brought up on American Iron, I expected to see bearing inserts and was kind of shocked to not see any.

[sketchman]

Yeah, modern small engines don't use them anymore. Don't know about the larger stuff. Just bare aluminum against steel. Sounds really stupid now that I think about it. But it generally works fine.