Catastrophic engine failure NOW WITH CONCLUSION!

[PapaSmurf2k3]

I'll tell you man, it's almost like something came loose and wreaked havoc on the internals. I mean, even the front of the oil pan is gone.
I can see the bottom of the rod cap (and the nuts/bolts holding it on). They are scuffed up pretty bad... this should be interesting when it comes out.

[Dattebayo]

Looks like a bearing seizure followed by some serious force.

Maybe yakota was right...

[yokota180sx]

in for teardown pics. thatll tell the real story

[PapaSmurf2k3]

Ok, gonna post pics in chronological order. Some might get redundant as the teardown progresses.


Trying to get the Bell downpipe off the turbo. According to them, you have to loosen the manifold, the turbo, and the downpipe. Then, sort of remove everything all at once.

Just trying to pull the downpipe off the back makes it hit this shelf. I'll be cutting into that bad larry for future ease of assembly/removal.

I ended up loosening the turbo off the manifold (1 nut took me just about as long as everything else on the car combined), and the downpipe off the turbo. I then pushed the motor over HARD, loading the passenger side motor mount, and wiggling the turbo out free.


New angle on the damage with the turbo removed. POW! Right in the kisser!


Fast forward to tonight:

Pulled the hood, as well as a bunch of other stuff I had forgotten about: Shifter plate, slave cylinder, engine mounts, fuel line (needed that new fangled fuel line tool... gay), a couple harness connections.

The chain is attached. TIME TO GET DOWN TO BUSINESS!

COUNT IT!

Naked engine bay. The Bell Engineering (BEGI) downpipe in its natural state... sitting on the Miata subframe, ready to rattle.

6 speed goodness.

Miata Master Trey! It definitely takes balls (or a fiance I suppose) to pull an engine in a white T-shirt and Khakis. He's getting married on Saturday

Valve cover removed. Looks clean as hell for almost 167k on the clock.

Pulled a bearing cap to make sure there's no scoring due to contamination of engine junk from the explosion. LOOKS GOOD MAN!


Plugs look good man! No massive head damage evident.

Flyin miata lightweight flywheel looks good!

More passenger side hole.

The head is off!

Contact with the intake valves. RUH ROH RAGGY!!!



"s*** will buff out!"

That'll be no problem for a machine shop.


"YES!" -Trey

"Awesome!" - Trey

Yeah, need a new one of them. Broke the weld, deformed the s*** out of everything.


The garage. The floor is sloped (we'll go ahead and say its on purpose... yeah... that's it) so everything drains right out.

[nissangirl74]

Damn dude. This sucks. I have never seen one do that before. It'd be a lot cooler if were someone else's motor....

[alms24sebring]

Wow man, so concluded connecting rod/piston wrist pin failure. I will give you and Trey credit. First, I lol'd at the fact that he wore a white shirt, I would have never noticed. Not that but how do his clothes still look like he just bought them!? I mean not even a scuff mark! (where is the regular bowdown emoticon when you need it). That really sucks too because the inards of that motor look brand spankin new and that really suprised me. On the bright side, I guess its good that no metal chunks got sucked up by that beautiful turbo of yours, so that can be transferred over and it saved about $1500.

[PapaSmurf2k3]

Yeah, you can actually still see the hash marks from the factory honing.
Also, the wrist pin is still attached to the piston. I pounded it down in the cylinder after I took the pics and uh, looked at it through the hole in the block. I'll be getting an engine stand tomorrow. Then I'll whip off the oil pan and remove the guts.

[raremotive]

Very interesting, all pistons and rods accounted for. Lose a counter weight?

Glad your head made it mostly untouched.

[sbird1]

That is unbelievable. Everything looks so new and pristine and then there's a giant hole in the block. How sad.

[PapaSmurf2k3]

After you mentioned that, I started to notice the same thing. "Everything just seems so clean and pristine in here..."

Engine on the stand, flipped to see the MASSIVE damage to the oil pan.


There's no coming back from that one.

Oil pickup tube. Smashed.
I'm gathering quite the pile of "random bits of engine" and keeping it on my shelf. It grows by the day.

I got to these little buggers holding the oil pan shroud on (or whatever the technical term for it is). Looks like an inverted torx. I had owned an inverted torx set once for pulling the seats out of my Maxima, but it seems to have grown legs and disappeared. I'll have to check around to see where I can borrow/buy a set.

[PapaSmurf2k3]

Note, I haven't cleaned or wiped anything down. That really is how everything looks inside the engine.

[sx moneypit]

Damn James, how many revs were you turning!?

[alms24sebring]

I love pics of catastrophic failures, but not when it happens to me. Im eager to see whats behind the shroud there.

[PapaSmurf2k3]

Damn James, how many revs were you turning!?

Cruising @ ~2600 RPM... under vacuum.

[PapaSmurf2k3]

Just had a new post typed and accidentally hit the "x" on the tab when switching back from photobucket. Ugh.
Someone on mnet asked me about engine management. Here's the response:
Hydra 2.7 with the cruising AFRs slightly on the lean side. Anything under boost is plenty safe though. Base timing from FM.

Now, when I had the megasquirt in the car, it wouldn't rev passed 4000 RPM. In fact, it hit quite the wall at that point. It would buck quite hard. The Megasquirt also seemed to "supernova" one day when it dropped the #3 injector. Before it quit working, it DUMPED fuel in there. It added 1/2 quart of fuel to my oil in just about a minute. For all I know, this could have caused some preliminary damage (maybe it was running on the verge of hydro-lock?), followed by some slow crack propagation or something during normal operation with the Hydra.

Again, not saying that was the root cause by any means, just giving you all a little background on cylinder #3 hah.

I picked up an E-10 external torx socket to remove the windage tray/ main bearing support plate/ whateverthehellyouwanttocallit.



Gumby would be proud

Had to pound a socket onto that guy. The stud was bent too, so it was a pain to remove (as was the other connecting rod nut).

Piston at the bottom of the bore (after I knocked it down), connecting rod facing it.

looks good, no signs of overheating.


Bearings look good for the most part.

That sucker was a pain to pry away from the crank.



devastated piston.


good, clean break.

Bushing looks MINT.

Definitely missing some chunks of rod.

Aforementioned pile of stuff, oil pan not included. There's a piston oil squirter in there somewhere too.

[Razi]

Holy damn.

[alms24sebring]

Daaaam I dont know what to say..

So when you getting the new motor? Getting better rods??

[PapaSmurf2k3]

I wish ET were around, with his glowing finger. He'd be all "OOOUUUUUCCCHHHHH EEELLLLLIIIOOOOOTTTTT" and fix the damn thing.

[PapaSmurf2k3]

Already bought the new short block from a '99. Jeremy at Flyin Miata said they might have some rods and pistons (like, top of the line) that they pulled out of a car that he would cut me a sweet deal on, so I'm waiting on that. Otherwise, its looking like Eagle rods and wiseco 9:1 compression ratio, 1mm overbore pistons. Ken at Enjuku never returned my email, so I'll probably go elsewhere for the hardware or give him a call if I don't like what I hear from Flyin Miata.

[Razi]

At least the good part is that you'll be making more power afterward all this.

[alms24sebring]

Yes, and no worries for sure, you could even pump the boost safely if you wanted. I hope you get a bomb deal on it

[PapaSmurf2k3]

Absolutely! Right up until I blow the rear diff. I think I'll cut myself off at around 275rwhp. The engine will be able to handle much more, but I start risking the rear diff and trans passed 300. Besides, 275 will be nothing to f*** with in a ~2300lb car.

[alms24sebring]

[PapaSmurf2k3]

Aaron got it right I think.
Someone was asking me about this at work today, and I was looking at the pictures. I noticed the piston was missing some oil staining on the sides, and upon further inspection, noticed some deep wear along the fracture. I then thought about how the cylinder had been FLOODED with gas back in the day, and came up with this theory:
The gas flooding slightly bent the rod, causing the piston to side-load the cylinder wall. This went on for roughly 11,000 miles, when finally it wore through the side, busting the skirt off the piston. This then got wedged between the piston and the cylinder wall during a downward stroke. The rod kept going, causing the massive downward force on the piston and cracking around the wrist pin, as well as finishing off the rod. The rod then came out, through the block, smashed the motor mount etc, and bent into the compressive failure (buckling) seen in the pictures already posted.

I came home and inpsected the cylinder bore carefully. Its tough to see, but in the right light, you notice a difference in color/wear on one side of the cylinder, and upon further inspection of the piston, you can DEFINITELY see a wear ring.

Photobucket sent me an email saying I'm almost over my bandwidth, so you get facebook hotlinked pics:



Note the wear ring around the left side of the piston. Sound good?

[raremotive]

Very interesting. Sorry again that you had to go through this. But in the end you get a sweeter motor!

Can you post a better picture of the clean break on the little end of the rod? You think the piston seized or the rod gave?

[alms24sebring]

dam son. That makes me worried now about flooding when trying to start it when there's a problem. What do you mean bent the rod tho, like it cooled it quickly and warped it? Im not ganna lie, the evidence does show exactly that.

[PapaSmurf2k3]

No, I mean I have some pretty giant injectors in there. At low RPM (like... idle), my Megasquirt ECU decided to take a s*** on me and open the #3 injector WIDE OPEN. An injector rated at 550cc operating at the Miata's 60psi flows quite a bit of fuel, enough to almost completely fill the combustion chamber on that cylinder. Once full of liquid, it really isn't compressible anymore (not to mention the engine was still cold). Rod comes up to compress the air/fuel mixture, except there is no air. It can't compress the fuel, so the rod bends a bit.

Again, THAT happened on my way to work one morning. I didn't even get out of my neighborhood.

[alms24sebring]

Oh I see. Make Megasquirt pay for it

[PapaSmurf2k3]

They didn't even want to give me a refund for the damn ECU (which never worked out of the box). I had to cancel payment via credit card. There's no way they'd pay for that.
Besides, its sort of the risk you take with modifying cars. You gotta pay to play.

[allenms240]

Holy Batman.