It's the little things...

[Power Surge]

The other day my brother calls me on the cell phone and says he needs me to come get him with the trailer. He says he lost oil pressure while crusing down the road, then shut the car down.

We pull the blower off the car (needed to get the dist out), pull the distributor, and the oil pump shaft looks like a corkscrew. I welded a rod to one end, slipped it into the oil pump and it wouldn't budge.

He pulled the pan off and pulled the pump out. We took it apart and were amazed at what we found. There was a tiny 3/8" long piece of wire wheel jammed in the gears. It acutally indented itself into each gear. He is guessing it may be from when he was cleaning the outside of the block to paint it before the motor went in. This was a year and a half ago!

He bought a new pump and a motorsport shaft, and put it all together and all is well. The car has 10psi more oil pressure at all times, and even sounds better.

There was one more thing that was baffling. We had both ends of the oil pump shaft (the one end broke off in the pump). When he dropped the pan, while cleaning it out he found a 3RD end of a corkscrewed oil pump shaft! Now keep in mind that this is the second motor in this car (he replaced the motor that was in it when he bought it) and that he swapped the pan over from the first motor. We are completely baffled as to where this 3rd piece came from, but it was in there. Strange stuff!!

The moral of this story is to be extra carefull when you have an open motor. Even thought his current motor was built already, and he had taped off all the ports and open ends, this piece of wire wheel still managed to get in there.

 

[COBRAIIW]

You mean that beautiful green '74?
Ouch, he got lucky!

 

[Power Surge]

You mean that beautiful green '74?
Ouch, he got lucky!

Yep. You should have seen him. He hadn't driven the car for like 5 days after it happened, and he was like a cocaine addict at a rehab. Once he got it back together and drove it again, he had his fix .

 

[Mustangj]

The small stuff will get you every time! My good friend bought my old 91 Lincoln Mark VII (that's one of the Lincoln with the 5.0l H.O and the Roller cam). I helped him lower a new engine into it previously. He went to our shop early in the morning and worked on the car all day, trying to get it started. He called me up him and his wife invited me over for dinner. He was beside him self and asked if I would mind having a look at it. He had worked on it all day and his wife was not all that happy that we were going back to the garage

-He changed the gas (it had sat for 2 years)
-He put in fresh plugs.
-He had Spark
-He had gas
-He had sputtering

I listened to it. I could here little explosions in the exhaust. "your 180 degrees out!" I said. "no way" he said! "I brought number one to top dead center on the compression stroke". He had brought his tools home, mine were at work, so I grabbed the little socket set out of my trunk. I took out the plug bumped over the engine. I rotated the distributor 180 degrees and put it back in. "try it now" I said. It started up on the first rev of the starter. We were ony there fo 10 minutes, fixed his car saved his marriage (if only I was that good everyday)

 

[Vince]

I learnt the hard way the importance of a clean engine about 10 years ago when I did my first 302 rebuild. That engine had the common problem of broken valve seal bits everywhere. I thought I got them all out but apparently not. After a few weeks of driving with my new motor my "OIL" light went on. I shut the engine down looked under the hood, checked the oil, everything seemed fine. Well I started her up again, she was running fine, so I drove home. After about 5 minutes I get onto my street and then I start to hear some really loud clanking noises from under the hood. I shut her down and pushed it home. I pulled out the distributor and found my oil pump driveshaft turned into a drill bit. After pulling the engine I inspected my oil pump and found it seized on a piece of valve seal the size of a grain of sand. No other damage that I could see though. For good measure I threw in some new bearings but surprisingly the old ones didn't look bad at all.

So after learning that lesson, on my 2nd 302 rebuild I just finished, I spent hours cleaning out the block, even after having it hot tanked. And I spent just as long getting the oil pump pickup clean. Then I ran compressed air through everything & re-cleaned it. So far no problems.

 

[itsaMustangtoo]

Been there,felt your pain. Put a single idler gear drive in my 289 -74 coupe. Had to drill a hole in the front of the block.Had a shop vac running while drilling,meticulously made sure every thing was clean. Flushed it with kerosene.Put it all back together, and 2 weeks later while heading home,you guessed it ,BANG,no oil pressure and lots of tapping.Pulled it apart & found one tiny sliver in the gears and a twisted shaft!