Can the rod bolts be replaced with the oil pan off and motor in the engine bay or would you have to take it to a shop?

 

It can be done from under the car. You do risk damaging your rod bearings and crank journals however.

 

Way back in 2003 one of the first things I did to my Evo before the 11th DSM Shootout was change the rod bolts. There has been a huge debate in the UK and JDM evo forums about which was more dangerous - running the car with the stock rod bolts or screwing up a stock rod bolt swap with arps.

The school of thought from a true machinest is that when you change the rod bolts which are captive in the top of the rod that the rod muct be re-sized

However, I have found that with patience and a custom made tool you can quickly and easily change the rod bolts to arp without any harm

One note - it is rpms and not boost which causes rod bolts to strech as the stopping and starting at TDC and BDC is the greatest stress on a engine

One car has the rod nut back off the stud into the oil pan!


Al

 

Thank Al..

 

ok so wut have i done today?

i haven't taken off the head yet but i did take off the turbo, exh. mani, and all that stuff....got that set removed and voila! there's the big hole of destruction:







i found the other half of the rod and the pistons (or what it used to be):

 

OMG!!! that is massive

 

sure you did not throw a grenade in block, holy crap....never ever seen anything like that..wow

 

omfg, I'm definitely gonna put ARP rod bolts before I go to a 3071...

 

Looks even more like a rod bolt failure................

 

they can go like that under little stress?.....he claimed to not have been bangin on it..but who knows.

 

Once the bolts stretch out they can let go with very little warning. On my car the #1 rod bearing spun under about 7 psi load on a slight uphill on a freeway while just cruising along. All of a sudden the car started lightly knocking and that was it. Luckily I heard the sound and parked the car immediately - my failure was lucky enough to be a spun bearing without any additional collateral damage.

In my case it was all the high rpm track time that caused my problems. The sad part for me was that I knew better; I just figured that with so many cars running like I was without problems I would be fine. I was wrong.

 

is that from shifting after redline alot?..like 7200rpm's...

 

damn that is crazy. u had to have pushed it when it blew.

 

high rpms cause this right and also knock?
if you have an engine that has had slight knock maybe the rod bolts tend to become loose and then bang your engine explodes

 

The destruction looks massive but all that is caused after the bolt lets go. Once the rod and piston are free from the crank they get flung into the valves and knocked back down into the block where the crank beats the snot out of them.

I had this happen on a previous car an surprisingly it really didn't make much noise at all. The motor felt out of balance and started to smoke a little. It shut down when the rod punched a hole in the block and I lost vacuum.