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Well, if you scroll further down, you can see the results of
our Labor Day weekend. We started the weekend fine on
Saturday, but weren't going long before we lost oil
pressure. Jason and I let ourselves believe that it was
just the gauge since the motor wasn't knocking. We should
have known better though, because it didn't take long for it to
start.
We ran into town and picked up a new oil pressure gauge, but
our problem wasn't the gauge. With no other choice, we
dropped the oil pan and discovered a large mass of solidified
mud that had been sucked up into the oil pump pickup, and the
lack of oil pressure had fried a couple of rod bearings.
They weren't quite bad enough yet to spell immediate danger, but
they had to be dealt with. Unfortunately for us, none of
the parts stores in town had the .020 under bearings that we
needed. We ran it a couple of times later on that weekend
with the loose rods, but the problems pretty much spelled the
end of our weekend.
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| After Labor Day, we knew that we needed to pull the motor
apart. When Jason did, we were surprised to find a lot
more damage that we had guessed. If you take a look at
these pic's, you can see what we mean.
As you can see, we managed to twist or bend most of the rods
in the motor. One of which is twisted nearly 90°.
Though it's not impossible that I missed seeing that the rods
were this messed up when I had the oil pan off on Labor Day, it
seems hard to believe that I would have missed seeing rods this
messed up. Not to mention that we cleaned out the oil pan
when we had it off, so from then to when we pulled the motor,
the tailings that you can see on the lower right had
accumulated. |
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| Now assuming that we twisted these
rods sometime between when we had the oil pan off, and when we
pulled the motor, I can't for the life of me figure out how we
managed to mangle them so badly. I know that if you
hydrolock a motor that you can do damage similar to this, but we
hardly ran the motor since having the oil pan off, and we
certainly didn't hydrolock the motor. Otherwise, excessive
heat could have done it as well, but if we had gotten them that
hot, then the pistons should have been destroyed (after all,
they are aluminum and the rods are steel). Also, you would
think that the rods would have shown some discoloration if they
had gotten hot enough to cause this sort of deformation.
Now here is the kicker... Despite all of this
damage, the motor still ran fairly well (we drove it into the
garage before we pulled the motor), and there was no damage to
the block. As you can see below (ok, you really can't see
it very well), the bore that had the worst rod in it was in
nearly perfect condition. All it had was a few nicks,
which we actually expected to see more of considering the
conditions we run the motor in.
Soooo, if you think that you know (I mean really know!) how
we did this, please feel free to send me your opinion at webmaster@BigDummyMudRacing.com. |
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| The rest of these shots show some
of the other vehicles at the Labor Day event. Many of
these guys you will recognize from our other photo albums. |
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