Pajero Owners Club of South Africa

Hi all. I'm new to this forum and was hoping someone could assist me.

My 2000 Paj 3.5 v6 petrol has done just under 600 000 km. It had a fairly disastrous 'rebuild' at about 450 000 km, but eventually after taking the head off numerous times over a period of about 18 months they got it running fine with no smoking.

On the way back from the Kalahari in February this year it seemed to lose some power, but carried on running ok apart from that - no smoking or missing. Recently it broke down and attempting to get it to start provoked a spectacular backfire. We tried spraying Quick start in the inlet, but that just resulted in a spectacular sheet of flame shooting out of the inlet. After a lot of digging it seems that on wet and dry compression test, the compression on all the cylinders is way down. Can anyone suggest where we go from here?
Many thanks.
Adam.

Hi Adam, and welcome to the forum.

If you have no compression, that means that pistons/rings/block rebore (all or some of them) are the necessary actions. Unless you have a stuck (open) valve and/or faulty valve seats, but if the compression is down on all of them, and you haven't changed the pistons/rings on the previous rebuild, I'd put my money on these rather than the heads.
Seeing that you had it rebuilt but that it never worked, you might be better off getting a second hand engine, especially with the kind of mileage on yours already.

Good luck.