My trusty 94 Ex is beginning to show signs of needing some TLC. I've owned it now for the last seven of so years having logged 170k miles. The previous owner ran it to 100,000 miles and seemed to take decent care of it. It's been a very trouble free car other than regular brake, tire and belt maintenenance. It now has the habit, only in winter of blowing thick blue smoke cold starts for the first minute or so. Obviously it's burning some oil, maybe a quart every 2500 miles or so. The oil burning is not obvious in the warmer months. However now, I've noticed the PCV has been clogging in addition to some weeping of oil. I'm guessing that the root cause of all of this is valve guides are worn and leading to blowby. One other thing happening now is the car is hesitating during light acceleration. This sounds like carbon buildup in the EGR circuit so again the blowby must be exacerbating the problem. My main question is how many miles can one rack up before expecting to require a valve job/head rebuild? The car has 270,000 miles but still runs overall like theres no tomorrow. How much can I expect to pay for machine shop/parts costs if I pull the head myself?

 

My 95 is over 380K without any issues....knocks on wood now.

The cost will depend on what is needed. You can call around and they can give estimates but until they inspect it they won't really know.