[DeTomaso] Another oil question ot two

steven.liebenow at att.net steven.liebenow at att.net
Thu Jun 24 04:30:38 EDT 2010


Dave,

If you can get at the coolant in the pan, you may be able to wick it up with a paper towel....but I'm not sure how much you did after taking the heads off......  I'm guessing you left the pan undisturbed as well as the front timing cover.....in which case, just drop the oil out of the pan and it should bring the old coolant with it....as it should be on the bottom of the oil...and pressure should force it out first......  But if you see small puddles of antifreeze, just dab them up with paper towels.       (I am now a fan of petcocks on the water drain holes in the sides of the blocks!!!  Or at least brass pipe plugs with hex heads on them...gooped up with anti-seize, or some other non-hardening sealer!!! ....so that you can remove them easily and drain the block so that you do not leave any water in the heads!!!) 

In my case, tonight the oil in the crankcase of my engine turned out to still look the consistency of a milk shake.....so much for settling!  Will give it a few weeks and see what it looks like......  I dumped in 4 qts of fresh oil (all I had at the time.....) and fired it up!  Let it get warm and by the time we were done letting it get up to temp, the oil looked fine still.  Any moisture left in the engine should evaporate off and get sucked back into the intake manifold via the breathers in the valve covers.....

To Jack's point about bearings etc, in my case, the leak occurred while the car was being driven.  We had a time frame of at least a week, where at that point, the dipstick was pulled and level checked, and there was no antifreeze "milkshake" happening.  Somewhere in that week, or perhaps the day of the ill-fated trip, the coolant vacated the block via the bad freeze plug into the oil pan, caused the temp gauge to rise, overheated the engine blowing the head gasket, and when we then pulled the dipstick, found the evidence of cross-contamination!  The compression test yielded the bad gasket diagnosis......but I missed the bad freeze plug thing until Monday night.......

I did pull the #8 rod bearing cap off when I had the engine out, to inspect the top bearing shell (load bearing side) and it looked to be as new.  As a result of this, I would concur that a short exposure is not going to be an issue.   Once we knew the oil was bad, we drained the pan and removed the filter a day or three after we found the mess.   I was running 5W-30 Mobil 1 in this car as well as my truck. I had to do an oil change in the truck about this same time, so I simply moved my old truck filter over to the car, and dumped the old oil back into the  car motor, so that we could move the car on the street if necessary, and into the driveway when the repair date was at hand! No pumping any more funkied up oil around than we had to!

In your case, you haven't pumped the anti-freeze around in the engine, so it really isn't mixed......so draining should be enough.

As for how long to run your engine after you put it back together before draining the oil and changing the filter?????   IT ALL DEPENDS!!!!  ..on how much you did!  If all you did was mess with the heads, your only break in run should be to temper the valve springs if new!   If you didn't change the cam and lifters, or re-bore it with new rings, I would say you wouldn't need to break anything in at all! Run it to 3500-5000 miles and then change it.....  However, we don't know exactly what you are doing or have done to it...... You need to provide a bit more info here to be able to answer that question more definitively!!!

The current line of thinking with new rings etc, is that they now seat in very short order, and that special oil is not required.  Even synthetics are fine for break-in! (reference Chevy's Corvette shipping with Mobil-1 installed)  I would think that only when you have a new flat tappet cam/lifters do you stand the chance of producing any metal filings of considerable size.....but a filter should catch these particles!     I believe that if one goes too heavy on the moly lube (assembly lube) that you could also potentially want to change the filter at the 350 mile stage.....or sooner.  (That is if moly particles are large enuf to be trapped in a filter!)   Other than the metal and the moly bits, your oil should be cleaned by the filter and basically, drive it to the first oil change may be the new mantra!

I'm now more inclined to swap out the filter early, on a new rebuild, and leave the oil until the first oil change!   I would be interested in hearing theory aye and nay on this!

Ciao!
Steve




Ciao!
Steve




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