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You do not want to end up as a feature on this page.

not for the faint of heart!

broken pickup
sm0018
dead head
skuff piston
sm0063
cracked block

Here is a nice shot of the famous number rod 2 bearing failure. This bearing was actually welded to the connecting rod. needless to say there were many other unhappy parts to this engine.

Here is what caused the failure of the bearing above - the oil pick up had sheared off and fallen in to the sump. The reason the pick up sheared off was that the balance shaft belt had been disconnected. The resulting high frequency vibration caused the fatigue that eventually failed. I rebuilt another engine for the owner and installed it - I couldn’t get the oil pressure to register but I knew there was pressure - when I questioned him about it he then told me that the oil pressure gauge had never worked....that explains why he continued to drive the car after the pickup fell off.

 

There are some folks that feel the MLS (Cometic) gaskets are a bad idea because they feel that the engine will ‘blow up’ before the head gasket. Here is proof of the opposite. This is a MLS gasket that failed due to high temp and pressure after an hour session at Watkins Glen.

Melted through the steel section of the gasket in the same place that almost all stock type gaskets fail.

A second shot of the melted gasket - that bowed out section is made of a high quality steel. Seems that a hard track driven 951 can generate quite a bit of heat!

A nicely scuffed piston - due to a head gasket failure and the driver kept pushing the car even with a leaky head gasket. Racers will keep going no mater what!

Nasty head. This poor head was destroyed when a turbo seal let go and added quite a bit of oil to the intake. The oil effectively dropped the octane rating of the fuel and the engine spent most of a weekend at the track running hard on detonation. The marks in the head were caused by chunks of the pistons that broke off above the top ring. Cylinders 1 and 4 looked like this and 2 and 3 looked like they had lost a lot of aluminum by erosion. Amazing amount of destruction. The engine kept running though the whole adventure.

In the end the customer needed a new set of pistons but the MID sleeve walls were close to new - just a hone ‘touch up’ and they were back in service. The Darton sleeves are some pretty tough items!

This one goes to prove the opposite of the stock head gasket ‘weak link’ theory. This was an old engine of mine in which I had a timing adjustment knob on the console. I gave somebody a test drive and the knob had been accidentally turned all the way up adding 15 degrees of timing. By the time the boost came on in third gear the engine went in to massive detonation and cracked the cylinder wall before I could get off the gas, The stock head gasket was still fine.

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