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The culprit of my engine failure.

B

beyondloadedSE

Hard-core CEG'er
Joined
Sep 29, 2000
Messages
3,799
Location
Louisville, Ky
No clue how this happened. The more interesting part. I dont know how it still ran like this. I limped it home about 30 miles when the crank gave out on the highway. I was just cruising along and all of the sudden, it sounded like something just unravveled and fell out from underneath the car. Fortunately, it didnt affect the Pauter rods in anyway and Ross Pistons appear to be fine too. If anyone wants to buy this, Blacksvtownsyou is selling it in the classifieds. :D

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Holy Crap!!:shocked: You drove it 30 miles with the crank cracked in half. That is crazy that it still ran. Reminds me of pics of the B-17's from WWII that came back w/ huge pieces missing from them. :laugh:
 
Pretty amazing it still ran , no doubt :blackeye: .

We actually had an MG-TF come into our shop a few years back that had the same problem , yet somehow the guy drove it to the shop under it's own power . The guy wanted to know what the noise in his engine was :nonono: .
 
Ouch, any idea what caused it? A few years ago, my friend's harmonic balancer went out on his 3.8 and broke his forged crank...it didn't run at all though.
 
I'm the one that pulled his engine apart. There were a couple issues that might've caused this which I'm going to run by Jim first.
 
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Jim,

Did you ever know the history of the car that the 3.0L originally came out of?

The only other time I've seen something similar was on one of our race cars. Car had a big accident at Daytona, smashed up really bad in turn one, we fixed the car, and looked the engine over, and every thing looked fine, then 2 races later, while we were in 3rd place, likely to finish second, the engine went weak and noisy, so we retired it and later tore the engine down to find the crank broken in half.
 
Wow. How hard would you have to hit to break the crank???? Not sure I'd want to know. Rara, did any other parts of motor show signs of damage on your car, before you rebuilt it?
 
TGO said:
wow is that a CEG first or what!?
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no kidding, I have heard of pistons grenading, I have heard of Rod bearings failing, but a crankshaft ripping in half AND it running for 30 more miles???? Now I have seen/heard everything.

Im willing to bet he had a defective crankshaft, **** like that doesnt just happen
 
getsum111 said:
Hasn't Jim been driving this motor for a while, though? I'd think, if it were defective, it would have shown up before now. Just my .02.
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metal just doesn't always fail instantly, it can yield and fail over time, also the stress cycled it went through can affect this too.
 
getsum111 said:
Hasn't Jim been driving this motor for a while, though? I'd think, if it were defective, it would have shown up before now. Just my .02.
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Understandable, but my question for you... How many duratec crankshafts have you seen like this?

My guess is there was a flaw somewhere in the forging process, some inpure contaminate was in there, or something else I cannot explain and it causes a weak point in the metal, which wasnt a problem at first, but after so many Redline runs and so many miles eventually said "im done"
 
Yeah, I guess that makes sense. I've never seen ANY crank that just broke in half. In my head I keep hearing a really loud crack!! as it snapped. Jim, did you hear the crank snap, or just hear the aftereffects?

Either way, it's really crazy.:crazy:
 
getsum111 said:
Wow. How hard would you have to hit to break the crank???? Not sure I'd want to know. Rara, did any other parts of motor show signs of damage on your car, before you rebuilt it?
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No, the motor looked fine. Almost identical symptoms to Jim's, but it was in the middle of a race so it was being driven very hard. The engine was a 4V mod motor, that has a forged crank, and I've NEVER seen one break even in 1000+hp engines. Even 600-800HP road racing engines.

Jim, I'd be willing to bet that the front of your engine got whacked somewhere along the way, and that led to the failure.
 
But how the hell is that possible? I guess the car didn't want to give up the ghost till you got home! :shrug:
 
getsum111 said:
Yeah, I guess that makes sense. I've never seen ANY crank that just broke in half. In my head I keep hearing a really loud crack!! as it snapped. Jim, did you hear the crank snap, or just hear the aftereffects?

Either way, it's really crazy.:crazy:
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It wasnt a really loud snap. I started noticing something unusual on the way from Indy to Greencastle which is about a 50 mile drive. About 5 miles outside of Greencastle I started noticing a weird metal sound coming from my sfhiter. Like a metal on metal vibration. I assumed the trans mount had failed and the trans was resting on the subframe. Btw, for about the last 3 months, EGTs were about 200 F higher than normal. Normaling cruising on the highway at like 70 mph was about 800F, but now they were reaching as high as 1000F. Anyways, I picked up my gf and got back on the highway. Got back up to 70-75 mph and the noise continued again. If youve ever heard a fatigue test being done of a rotating assy it sounded pretty close to this noise. Right before failure it got louder and then you just heard this big clunk and bouncing around. It only lasted for about a second or two and then it stopped. I immediately pulled to the shoulder and the car died as i was rolling to a stop. The car didnt want to stay running but if I was driving it would run. The car was definetely louder and sounded pretty unhealthy, and it sounded what I assumed was rod knock, but I know know, it was the one half of the crank smacking the other. Obviously, because it was a clean break, the one half of the crank would still rotate the other half. I made it home 30 miles driving on the shoulder. Got a flat tire in the process too. :(
 
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