New rebuilt 2F serious problem!!! Help!!

[cjgoode]

If you can turn it over at all I would put some oil in the cylinders and turn it over. We always used marvel mystery oil. I had one over heat like that with no oil on the first cylinder and with the same symptoms. Hard to turn over, but you could make it mover. Once the engine 100% cooled down the piston in the first cylinder might was well of been welded in there. Funny story, this was when we were in high school, so my younger brother pulls the head and pan, we hammer out the number 1 piston leave the rod off, take off the valve train for that one cylinder to the valves stayed closed, bolted it back up and started it up. It idled great, but as soon as you touched the gas it bounced all over the place. We went around the block once and nearly had out teeth rattled out of our heads.

 

[Poser]

OK new and way bigger problem. I got it all back together last night at about 11pm. Freeze plugs installed, new head gasket, re-lubed the cam and bearing journals, re-primed the oil pump while turning the crank. So about 2 hours ago I decide to fire it up and break in the cam. It starts instantly, and sounds pretty good, oil pressure is perfect between the 2 normal lines on the stock gauge, so I pull it out of the garage an idle it up to 2k rpm to break in the cam for 20 minutes. It's smoking pretty heavily at first, but I really didn't think much of it. The last motor I built smoked for a few minutes too. About 3 minutes in the smoking goes down significantly, oil pressure still holding steady in the same spot. About a minute or two later it starts to bog a little bit, so I give it a little more gas to get it back up to 2 grand, and it just stops dead. I hit the key and the starter can't even turn it over. So I get out, and pull the dipstick, and besides a few globs of assembly lube from re-lubing the cam lobes, it's dry and smoke comes out the dipstick tube. I pull the oil cap on the valve cover, and more smoke comes out. So I pull all the plugs, and the starter turns it over, but really slow. Then I go get a bucket and pull the drain plug. All 8 quarts of oil drain out no problem. Then I go get my crank socket, extension and breaker bar. I can barely turn it over by hand. So at this point I am extremely pissed, and push it back into the garage with my plow truck. I have not done any investigating yet, but how the hell could 8 quarts of oil leave the crankcase entirely, then flow back down and all drain out. And how the hell could it show good oil pressure, then seize?? I plan on pulling the pan sometime and seeing just how screwed I am, but this seriously doesn't make sense to me. I've got far more into this motor than I can believe trying to build a nice smooth running mild performance 2F and now i'm out of money and have a paperweight.

Main bearings are installed reversed....




Drop the oil pan and look and see what got hot.

It should be obvious.


Did you build this engine?

 

[bsmith123]

Sorry to hear it

Sorry to hear it, hang in there

 

[ken_79-fj40]

Main bearings are installed reversed....




Drop the oil pan and look and see what got hot.

It should be obvious.


Did you build this engine?

Yes I assembled this engine. I don't see how it's even possible to put the mains in backwards. They are all notched on one side so they only fit one way. If this was the case would this explain why there was no oil in the pan when it seized? My nice balanced crank is probably toast.

 

[Poser]

You are aware that there are upper and lower main bearings of each, correct?


Uppers have oil holes and the lowers that go into the main bearing cap do not have oil holes.



Drop your oil pan and post up some pictures of what you find in there.



Until you do that everything is speculation and conjecture.

 

[Poser]

You have seen these pictures

From THIS THREAD <---- this is a link

 

[ken_79-fj40]

Well it's nice to know i'm not the only one up this early thinking about this stuff. I fell asleep last night at 9 after a full day of building retaining walls and raking loam preparing for finally planting grass at my house. But I woke up at 3 thinking about this and couldn't get back to sleep. At about 4AM after reading Poser's post I went down to the garage and pulled the pan. You really are the man on this stuff. #1 main bearing is fine, and the rest are smoked. I only pulled 2 rod caps and they both looked fine, i'll pull the rest later just to double check. #2 and #3 journals on the crank look like they are OK. #4 is a little sketchy, but maybe some emory cloth will clean it up well enough. So this is what I found.

The bearings having 2 sides makes sense, but in the photos you can see that the # 4 bearing shell from the bottom has no holes in it. Also I recall that the #2 and #3 bearings were identical top/bottom in my ITM set. That still remains to be seen. So is there perhaps more to it? Also isn't it possible to install bearings without pulling the motor? I was thinking maybe if I loosened the 4 bolts holding the tranny on and jacked up the rear of the transfercase a little I could slip the uppers out.

 

[apeterson]

This sucks dude! How bad is ur crank? I am pretty sure #4 needs to have a bearing with a whole in it, reamber that is what happen to mine. U can put in new bearings but I don't think u can pull the crank if that is f'ed up.... what about ur cam bearings they might be messed up now to.... did u have the valve cover off to make sure u were getting oil to the head when u first started it?

I know more than anyone how u feel dude! Hang in there¡

 

[2badfjs]

I would also look at the main and rod bearings if you still have the oil pan off. If coolant got in the lower end like that you could potentially wipe out the bearings.... It is worth the time to drop them, wipe them clean, reoil them and them reassemble the whole deal.....

You've gone this far and spent $$$$$ take an extra hour or 2 and do it right so you don't have to pull it again 100 mile down the road

I was thinking the same thing about the cam and the pre-lube on the cam.

personally, (and maybe someone thinks different) i might think about pulling everything apart and reassembling it.



edit: i should read the whole thread before posting.

if you need a crank i have new refurbed one for a 78 motor (the that uses a bolt to hold the pulley on) and a set of bearings to match.
i'll make you a deal but shipping would be the killer.

 

[ken_79-fj40]

Later this morning a friend of mine who has built far more engines than I have crawled underneath to take a look and we agreed the crank has to come out. He's got a lathe so we may try to just polish it first and see how that goes before I spend even more money having it ground again. And all the bearings were in fact installed correctly. We took out the #2 and #4 uppers and they were in there correctly. We didn't bother with #1 because the bottom half was perfect and #3 is the thrust bearing and it wouldn't come out easily. So he thinks that the machine shop never cleaned out the oil passages in the block or the crank. I'll talk to the machinist tomorrow, but I did assemble it after all so I'm probably screwed. He told me when I picked everything up to wash out the bores and clean the block a little because it had been sitting a few days. I assumed he had cleaned out all the passages. So now I need another whole gasket set, probably will need the crank reground again, new main bearings at least, and maybe a new cam and cam bearings if I understand the illustrations regarding the oiling system. I did landscaping all weekend and i'm beat. But i'll probably get the motor out next weekend, and start tearing it down AGAIN. But to be honest I'm pretty broke from this rebuild and i'm going to need a riding mower soon. So unless the machinist takes some responsibility for this I won't have any more money to put into it for a while. Even before all this happened I had already spent twice what I was expecting to build this motor with everything that came up. The only thing that went as expected was the cam and lifters, which may now be junk.

 

[2badfjs]

Q:He told me when I picked everything up to wash out the bores and clean the block a little because it had been sitting a few days

this is S.O.P. when i got my crank back from the machine shop i ran compressed air thru all passages.
when i did this i found what looked like a bullet in one of the cranks passages.

go figure

 

[Poser]

I just got my 2F installed into my truck Thursday. Ran it for maybe 10-15 seconds just to verify I had oil pressure. smoked like crazy and ran rough, but I didn't think much of it considering it's old gas, timing is likely way off, etc. Today I was going to run it for 20 minutes to break in the cam, but I needed to finish filling the cooling system first. So I run out and get some antifreeze and distilled water and pour in 2 gallons on top of the 4 I put in thursday. Still wasn't full. So I run out and get 2 gallons of the premix stuff. Takes both of them. Somethings very wrong here. I pull out the dipstick, and antifreeze comes out. I pull the drain plug, and drain out about 10 gallons of oil and antifreeze. Please someone help me out here. What the hell did I miss that allows you to fill the crankcase with coolant? I've got some serious cash tied up in this motor, and I just filled it with damn water!

Later this morning a friend of mine who has built far more engines than I have crawled underneath to take a look and we agreed the crank has to come out. He's got a lathe so we may try to just polish it first and see how that goes before I spend even more money having it ground again. And all the bearings were in fact installed correctly. We took out the #2 and #4 uppers and they were in there correctly. We didn't bother with #1 because the bottom half was perfect and #3 is the thrust bearing and it wouldn't come out easily. So he thinks that the machine shop never cleaned out the oil passages in the block or the crank. I'll talk to the machinist tomorrow, but I did assemble it after all so I'm probably screwed. He told me when I picked everything up to wash out the bores and clean the block a little because it had been sitting a few days. I assumed he had cleaned out all the passages. So now I need another whole gasket set, probably will need the crank reground again, new main bearings at least, and maybe a new cam and cam bearings if I understand the illustrations regarding the oiling system. I did landscaping all weekend and i'm beat. But i'll probably get the motor out next weekend, and start tearing it down AGAIN. But to be honest I'm pretty broke from this rebuild and i'm going to need a riding mower soon. So unless the machinist takes some responsibility for this I won't have any more money to put into it for a while. Even before all this happened I had already spent twice what I was expecting to build this motor with everything that came up. The only thing that went as expected was the cam and lifters, which may now be junk.

You ran your engine with water as a lubricant. You can see in the picture below that there was still water in the system as it is clearly mixed with what ever oil was trying to work through the system.



How is the machine shop at fault for that?

 

[ken_79-fj40]

I'm not saying that me filling the engine with water is the machine shop's fault. And I had pulled each bottom bearing cap and put some assembly lube into each bearing before I fired it back up. But of course just in the bottoms. When I spoke to the machinist this morning there was another big misunderstanding from when I picked the engine up. I had assumed that he had already prepped the block and crank and pulled any oil galley plugs and cleaned out all the passages. My understanding is that all I had to do was clean out the block because it had been sitting in his shop uncovered for a few days since he had cleaned it, which I did. But he assumed that I was going to pull the oil galley plugs and clean everything out. I didn't and all the crap in oil galleys is what caused this, not the traces of water. All the rod bearings are fine, and so is #1. He's offered to re-polish the crank for me, and I am very grateful for that. But I'm still going to need to sink some money into gaskets and bearings again, which I don't currently have, so it's going to sit for a while longer. I just hope it didn't wipe out the cam bearings and possibly the cam too. I might get it out of the truck this week and start tearing it down, hopefully I don't find any more surprises.

 

[apeterson]

hmmmm.... well see what you find when you get it all apart I guess.... I did not want to take a chance on bearings... so I replaced all mine.... at least your cam looks like it has oil on it..

 

[ken_79-fj40]

hmmmm.... well see what you find when you get it all apart I guess.... I did not want to take a chance on bearings... so I replaced all mine.... at least your cam looks like it has oil on it..

I'm glad to see yours is in the final stages of recovery. I'm sure that you will enjoy driving it in the warm weather finally after all that work. Mine will be fine in another month or so, I just really wanted it back together so I could enjoy it for the entire season. I generally only drive it from late may until early october and financially/timewise it's looking like I won't have much money and even less time for another month at least. I'm trying to finish my house and get a pretty big lawn going at the same time, and I have a 2 year old. If I have to replace the cam and get the lifters resurfaced again it's not the end of the world. Another painful and expensive lesson of cruiser ownership learned. Just like you I'm getting far more experienced at 2F removal and dissasembly than I ever imagined.