Well, for those that have seen my other thread you already know that there is a significant amount of metal in my oil.


Here's a link for the full res image: http://members.shaw.ca/swds.mlowe/Car/MetalinOilBig.jpg

I took a stethoscope to the engine and there's no knocking, there's no screeching, all in all the engine runs strong. There's aproximately 370 miles on the engine since I put in a new valve train, ported heads and rather large cam. Yesterday the electric waterpump blew the fuse and died, the car over heated and the above pictures are the result of the first oil change after the fact. There was no metal in the oil until the over heating. The head gaskets didn't blow and there is no coolant in the oil.

The car was in the red zone for a maximum of 10 seconds. After replacing the fuse with a breaker and fixing the cooling system the engine has run, without issue for a total of 5 minutes.

That brings us to now... what the hell do I do? Obviously this could be the start of a spun bearing or it could be some valve train parts clearancing themselves when the heads expanded due to over heating. Running several changes of oil through it seems like the thing to do...

To my way of thinking, if I spun a bearing then what I do doesn't matter one bit. The bottom end is already in need of a rebuild. If I haven't spun a bearing then doing everything I can to get all the metal out of the oil pan/block is obviously the right move.

 

I sincerely hope it is not as bad as it looks BUT I would be afraid of running it and have it catasrophically fail. At this point IF a bearing is wiped you are talking mostly machining. If you run it and it gets to the point of failure worst case is you could destroy the whole shortblock and even damage a head.

 

Well, I've decided to run a few changes of oil through it. If I see more metal bits I'm going to pull the engine and replace all the bearings. A stroker build sounds nice, but waiting 4-8 weeks at best for machine work will effectively kill the rest of the season for me. At least this way I should be able to get it all done in two weeks of casual work.

I plan on replacing the cam bearings, rod bearings, main bearings, oil pump, rear main seal, head gaskets, oil pan & gasket, and other gaskets that are along the way. Any other suggestions as to what I should freshen up with the motor out of the car?

 

I don't think I would run it at all any more. Might end up with a way worse situation that will kill your wallet too!

 

looks like bearing to me.

drop the pan and check em out.

 

>maybe this is premature, but welcome to the rebuild club.

 

Don't know what ya used for springs for the new cam but it could be the cam bearings if ya got stiff springs. Been there.

 

I wouldn't run it and just start tearing it down. That's a lot of metal in your oil and it isn't going to get better

 

Quick question for you. If a bearing was on its way out, and I was seeing the amount of metal in the oil that I have been, would I be able to hear it better with a mechanics stehoscope? I can hear quite faintly what I think is an intake leak. I assumed that's what it was since I have split BLMs and because the sound totally went away when using the stehoscope on the block.

 

Cam bearings will not knock only rods and mains but ya got to get them at the right RPM and load.
A main will knock under a load like 2500 in 5th gear and mat it.(most of the time)
A rod that is just starting to knock will knock when ya are cruising and with no pull and no let off,ya got to get the gas just right.
If ya can hear a rod at idle it is fixing to window the block.
With the amount of metal I see I wouldn't drive it I would pull it and start checking.

 

Ditto not driving it. Looks to be quite a bit of metal. If it's in need of a rebuild, might as well go ahead and bite the bullet. Don't make it worse by hoping it will go away.

 

Yea, I haven't driven it or turned over the engine since I took that pic. Actually I went out and bought a truck, so I'm pretty sure I'm just going to do a 383 rebuild.

 

That's not metal. This is metal in oil! Not trying to take nothing away from you as I know how it feels. Hope you get that resolved.

 

run a strip of duct tape around the center of your oil filter then cut it in half with a hack saw and see what kind of debre is in it

 

Well I finally got some free time to work on the car in a while. I cut open the oil filter as suggested and found some small specs and one sliver. The sliver was definitely metal. I then rigged up a fairly powerful electromagnet and found that none of the specs or the sliver was magnetic. I'm going to pull the intake and such and see if there's anything out of the ordinary.

What should I be looking at that's made out of aluminium?