End of last summer my Camaro started to run really rough, so I just said screw it and put it away for the winter. Well I just got the money together to start digging back into it, maybe replace the head gaskets to see if thats why Im getting coolant in the oil. Well I took the intake off and decided to do a little porting to match it to my 58mm TB. When I sat down to go at it I noticed that the entire inside of the intake was filled with tiny metal shot.

Midsummer last year I had a local machine shop do all my block work. Apparantly when they went to clean the access crap off the block by spraying it with metal shot, they forgot some. The metal has to be coming from the block, because I have aluminum heads and intake and they dont clean those with this shot. Well it obviously went throughout the entire engine, or howelse would I have it INSIDE of the intake manifold.

What should I do? Will the machine shope take care of me? I'll know by around 4 tonight, so I guess I'll post back when they tell me what they'll do.

 

You lost me... how could anything like metal shot, from internal to the engine ever end up in the intake manifold? Was the steel shot media used to clean the internal parts of the engine, or the external parts? Not real clear from your description.

 

sounds like you broke a valve or something. The "metal shot" you are seeing is most likely just pieces of metal from the valve/piston. once the head of the valve breakes off there is nothing to keep the debris from shooting back up into the intake. I've seen it a million times. But only way to be 100% sure is to pull the head from the suspect side of the engine. Pull the plugs out and see which one is messed up.

 

ok let me try to clear this up...

my machine shop...or former machine shop uses metal shot....like each piece round and about 4 times as big as a piece of sand to blast clean the block after the bake it to clean it. somehow, yes I know its weird, this stuff got into my intake manifold...which cant be cleaned with this same process because it is aluminum. No its not a valve or spring or anything like that. I took the heads off and every cylinder has deep gouges from where this stuff obviously dropped down the intake, scored the walls, and shot back out the exhaust. Around the same time this all happened I also started getting coolant in the oil, so the shot could also have been in the water jackets Im guessing, but I have no idea. Another weird thing is that I changed the oil and found none of this stuff in the oil...so apparantly it didnt get into the bottom end....which hopefully saved my fully forged rotatong assembly. The guy from the machine shop is coming over today to check it out. We'll see what happens.