Help tracking down cause of engine failure
 

Last week, my engine crapped out on me..

what happend was pretty random and freakish..

A friend of mine was driving my car, I was riding shotgun..

we were cruising on the highway.. everything was normal..

mixed driving.. occasionally boosting like a 2nd or 3rd gear pull to redline.. (he hit the limiter once currently set at 8,000)

then cruised some more.. we pull off the highway on some side roads...

and my friend says he feels like the car wants to go off... I assumed it was the VTA from the bov and his first time driving my car..


a couple minutes later.. we hear a sound.. we pull over first chance we get

and I immidieatly recognize the sound.. TTRRRRRRRR spun Bearings.. {thumbdwn}



that's when I notice the oil trail behind the car...

I look under the car and theres oil leaking everywhere...

I towed teh car home.. and theres oil down the whole passenger side of the car, from the motor till the exhaust tip...

so the result of oil starvation pretty obvious...


oil pan dry, oil return line normal.. front pulley and this area back drenched...

I was convinced it was the front main seal blowing out from crank case pressure or something...

but Fast forward a week later.. i've torn the engine compleltley down.. and I can't for the life of me figure out the source of the sudden oil leak...


i'm now going to rebuild the motor.. but i'm worried that once it's all together what if it just dumps all the oil on first start up? and for my own sake of curiousity... I want to know what the hell went wrong out of the blue with the car...


is there anything common in this area that goes kaput?

If its not obvious then you need to take everything to a machine shop and have it cleaned and magnafluxed for cracks/failure. Check for cracks, holes with no plugs and around the oil pump case for starters--thats also upfront.

Yeah I checked the oil pump seal.. it looked good.. but didn't check the pump itself over inch by inch

the speed at which the oil evacuated the engine made me think it was pressure fed not gravity..


the problem is, we have no hot tanking or magnafluxing capabilities here.. :(



even the timing belt was oily which makes me suspect it was under the covers as well..

I think the biggest trouble your going to have is the fact you have so much oil everywhere you will never pin point the leak.

All you can do is as already suggested have a machine shop check all the parts and replace every single seal on the engine for new and i cant see you haveing a porblem anymore.

my engine gave out a week or so ago also. My oil light came on so I turned off the car. I checked the oil level and it was good. I turned the car on, no oil light, and started driving to the auto parts store to get oil to top it off. Oil light started blinking and right away motor started ticking. Turned it off and found gold flakes in the oil the next day. Not sure what caused the oil pump to let go or loose oil pressure.

I would have done some tests prior to pulling the motor.

After all that money you will spend rebuilding it I would just get a new block and not worry about it anymore :)

Oil filter spun loose. At high rpm the oil pump puts out high pressure. The oil filter subject to high pressure wants to become a sphere. This can relieve the pressure on the gasket.

+1

Since its already toast clean it and find the leak. Engine oil dye should have been used.

But too late.

Oil filter ok>?

Negative on the oil filter. It took me a whole lot of effort to spin that off and im a big guy.


On a side note i had alot of oil consumption amd blow by. But i would top up the oil regularly. Turns out detonation had damaged two of the pistons and pressure was sneaking passed them.

I dunno if that pressure eventually took something out in the bottom end tho.

well same here. I had alot of oil consumption and my dipstick popped out a couple times during pulls. hmmmm

u can read more about my oil consumption here:

https://www.evolutionm.net/forums/ev...my-rx-7-a.html

same here!! had the same problems and a few weeks later spun a rod bearing

I went through that thread already lol.
I had great compression, leakdown test came out good. My cylinder 2 had what I thought was oil on top of it but when it got torn down it looked more like coolant. Turbo was good. The only other thing we thought it could be was the valve seal and I had those replaced. A couple days later after a few pulls my dipstick popped out and later that night oil pump gave out I guess and my motor started ticking.

so u think there's a pattern developing?

oil pump woes?

sounds like the RB26 guys now lol