[DeTomaso] Another oil question ot two

Dave Londry davel at emspace.com
Thu Jun 24 14:04:11 EDT 2010


Hey Steve,

I was going to ask you what your oil was. (I'd have bet that water would settle out of Mobil1)
BTW, are you adding zddp? 5W-30 is way down.
 They aren't even publishing a spec on 15W50 anymore and it was the real thing..

We get significant water in the oil in cold Canada winters coupled with urban driving.
The DeTomasos stay in the garage, but with our drivers, we're forever 
having to find some highway to warm the oil up.
If you don't do so regularly, you get muck.

The whole engine thing with 6143 was unplanned, so the car is in the 
garage nose-first with a 15 degree driveway right behind it.
I can't get an engine lift there, so this is all with the block in place.
New valves, springs, 2 rockers, lifters and cam (#6E was wiped and 1/4 
inch eroded from the lifter), timing chain & sprockets.

The front cover is still off so I was thinking of spraying a quart of 
varsol into the pan from the front, and just letting that drain nicely.
The alternate is cutting out the member below the pan and installing the 
removable-member kit.

To me the big question is if significant glycol stuck in the drain passages.
If it did, I'd leave the lifters out, load up 5 qts of low-viscosity 
diesel oil and run the starter until it's well circulated.
Then toss that and put it all back together.

As far as break-in goes - the new flat-tappet cam and lifters are the items.

I was hoping to drive it a bit this summer and then do the pan-thing 
next winter.
I need to look in the rod-bearing and mains to see if they picked up any 
of the missing steel from the old cam and lifter.
The magnet on the plug had a pinch of very, very fine iron on it.

So what do you think?
tks
dave



steven.liebenow at att.net wrote:
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





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