Motor Grenade'd Looking for Feedback
 

I am looking for some feed back and thoughts on if this had happened to you?

Let me preface this by saying my build is now two years old and the motor had 15K miles on it, it was built by one the site sponsors. I recently lost my motor to a failed lifter. It sounded like I had a bird chirping under the hood and my oil pressure was bouncing all over the place. I cut open my oil filter and found enough metal to make me sick and knew the motor was done.

I proceeded to break the motor down and found a roller on one of the lifters had jammed and was ground down to almost nothing. Thinking I found the problem and it was just my dumb luck I proceeded to break down the rest of the motor.

In removing my oil pump I found that the double roller timing chain had been cutting into the melling oil pump. Hmmm could the metal being cut off the pump have been the reason the roller lifter jammed???

In doing some research I found this is known issue and that caution and some grinding needs to be done to ensure proper clearance. Is speaking to melling they said you can't use a double roller with the high volume pump.

To me this appears to be an improper build or mismatched component problem and it was only a matter of time for some type of catastrophic failure to occur. It wasn't if something would fail it was when!


So here is what I am looking for feedback on. Would anyone here hold the engine builder responsible and expect them to stand behind their build or was this just my dumb luck and take the $11K loss like a man?

Thanks

Did you buy a longblock or shortblock from the sponsor? If its a longblock when I would expect them to accept some responsibility.

With that said, I use a double timing chain with a melling oil pump...were the spacers there between the pump and block? Double timing sets always include spacers.

Yes, double roller needs spacers. The Melling HV pump is also thicker than stock, so some grinding on the timing cover might also be needed. I used a single roller with my Melling HV pump to avoid having clearance issues.

It was a long block, even paid for them to dyno it normally aspirated so I had no surprises when I installed it with the supercharger.

There were spacers on the on the oil pump, they looked to be about .0125 thick.

Those are pretty thin, you mean 0.125"? Regardless I think the shop should be responsible if they are the ones that installed the timing set and oil pump. Proving that this led to the bad lifter would be hard. I would think the filter would catch anything large enough to cause significant damage.

Yeah it would be hard to say it caused the lifter problem, but if I had my own shop a charged top dollar for an engine build like that I would go in and fix it for free. If it had 50k+ miles of abuse it would be diffferent, this was clearly the engine builders falt, your engine should look almost nothing short of bran new on the inside.

I have great news, I just received and email from the builder and they agreed there had to be some clearance issues and will stand behind their work.

They said if I send back the block they will refresh it and supply new lifters and the appropriate oil pump.

I appreciate the feed back I received.

Great Sponser!!!! Who was it?

That is an excellent sponsor. We should know who that is so those looking for a forged motor can shop confidently.

It is Texas-Speed, I can't tell you how relieved I was to get that email from them.

I will do my best to provide status updates as the rebuild is progressing.