My fiance's car was a wreck that was repaired and sold to us. What we have found out is it was wrecked in the front and it sat with the anti-freeze exposed for some time and we are tired of replacing components on the motor to stop it's "gurgling" and now the newly developed rough starts. I want to get your guys input from anyone whose has ran either one of these companies rebuilt 3.4 motors in the 2003-2005 range. I like the 3yr/ 100,000 mile warranties. This is going to be run in stock only application in her car. If you don't really like these but have ran an alternative that has just of good of a warranty that you really like please let me know. Thank you for all the input folks.

 

The engines rebuilt by Jasper or the manufacturer are good but they come with a pretty big price tag. If the car was hit that hard in the front to do that much damage you may be spending good money after bad.

I would have a body shop look it over to make sure there isn't a lot of hidden damage that was glossed over.

There is no sense putting a $2000 motor in a $500 car.

 

Assuming the car is in good enough shape that a new engine would fix your problems, you might want to think about the 3.8L offered in these cars. You can find them everywhere, you could probably put a used 3800 and tranny in the car for much less than a new 3400. The 3800 is very reliable, and will return the same gas mileage as the 3400.

 

Thank you for the input folks. I saw what the car looked like before the guy done the repair work to it. I might as well come out and say this is referring to the motor in a Grand Am and not a monte, but it's essentially the same motor. The problem is we didn't find out about it being a repossession till we started digging through the slew of junk in the trunk. It appears the orig owner was driving it down around Baltimore and wrecked it. But he never reported it to the insurance, and I guess stopped making the payments and all the while the antifreeze system got exposed to moisture (it must of been sitting for quite a while). When the chevy dealership got it repossessed I know the bodyshop would have said it wasn't worth fixing. That's when it went through the Bel Air auto auction (for dealers only). Of course since there wasn't an insurance claim it has a clean title according to carfax. I have seen the 3.8's in these cars and they are a pretty tight squeeze for maintenance (since this is a Grand am we are talking about) and we don't want to have to be doing a tune to this thing and mess with all the BCM stuff with a 3.8 swap. We are seriously starting to look into low mileage motors with (under 25k) on them and just do the Fel-Pro upper and lower intake gasket set to it. There is far less chance of problems in a 25k motor than ours that we know was exposed to moisture a good while (example: we had to replace the thermostat housing "pipe" since we couldn't get it to seal since after sanding all the corrosion off, it just kept weeping around the hose). We got the car with 50k on it and it now has 80k. Low mileage motors in this range have come down quite a bit in price since we bought the car 2.5 years ago.