legacycentral bbs

Last friday i did some bottom end damage to my car. I am about 95% sure it's piston rings on the driver's side of the engine. Here's how it went down:

Driving on highway, everything is fine, go to pass a car, get around him (12 psi full boost, 95 mph or so in 5th, been running the same setup for a month or so). As soon as i get in front of him the car looses all power, but still drives. I'm thinking WTF and look in my rear view mirror, as weird as it sounds, i large grin came on my face.... there was a GIGANTIC trial of smoke, i mean massive. Boost dropped to ~5psi max.

I keep driving to the nearest gas station (3-4 miles) park the car and take a look under the hood. There is a massive amount of oil on the driver's side of the bay. After looking over everything to find the source i notice that the dipstick it pushed out of the dipstick tube. i put it back in, added about a quart of oil, then started the car. Exhaust gas was puffing out of the filler neck (cap was off). I turned down the MBC all the way and drive to my brother's house, about another 2 miles.

I haven't checked to see if there was exhaust in the coolant.

This weekend i'll try to pull the engine and remove most of the accessories and whatnot. I am going to pick up another 22t block, i already have dohc 2.5rs heads and intake manifold lined up, and will build the new engine in another week or so.

That sucks! Hmmm, I wonder if there is a Suby virus going around? My #4 let go about 2 weeks ago too! I'm looking for a EJ22T short block as well. If you find more then one and it's a good price then let me know.

This might be of help to you two:

http://car-part.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi

Woah.

What the heck?! What's going on?

I remember mile hi once saying something about cylinder 4 being susceptible to problems because it runs hotter than the others due to insufficient coolant flow.

MK, have you recently had any cooling system problems?

I also lost piston #4 three weeks ago. If you are pulling the engine (which obviously you have to), it only takes another couple of hours to replace the pistons and rings, why not go that way? While your at it, have the heads rebuilt. Then you have a close to new engine. Pulling the pistons out and replacing them is EASY! Or at least easy if you have some mechanical sense.

Well, I know what I'm doing when I go to my car today. Boost all the way down. I'm scared .

I second the "why don't you rebuild it" sentiment. But if you just source another shortblock, let me know. I am still mourning having to sell mine to pay rent a couple of months ago. I don't car if it is fubared as long as the block isn't cracked since I would gut and rebuild the thing from ground zero anyways...

mTk wrote:Exhaust gas was puffing out of the filler neck (cap was off)

Isn't it normal for air to "puff" out of the filler neck with the cap removed? Maybe it wasn't exhaust gas...

Andrew

I'm going to ask the question.....even though I have an idea of the answer.

Those of you that have had engines go recently. I'm assuming you were running higher the stock boost correct? What other mods did you have? and finally, what kind of engine management did you have?

That last question is key. I see no reason for pistons to go bye bye if proper tuning/engine management was in place.

I'm not pointing fingers or doing the I told you so bit.....just curious whether/what tuning/management was setup at the time of the failures.

Matt, you weren't running with an upgraded fuel pump?

Perhaps it's a fuel starvation problem coupled with the lack of an o2 sensor signal.

My cause was faulty O2 sensor wiring. The wiring shorted and caused a severely lean condition. It happened off boost and caused the car to actually quit running too. When I cut the wiring the car ran again but the damage was already done. I was on the stock ECU, injectors, and FP. I'm not saying that I might not have had a problem on down the road somewhere related to fuel but this instance was caused by bad wiring and that's that. The car was running rich up to that point.

Oh and I might just do a full swap so that I can rebuild my old engine slowly and make it a monster. If I do a short block it's because I might have damage to my cylinder walls as well.

mods were increased boost, exhaust, intake, msd ignition. Everything else was stock legacy turbo.

I need to get teh car back up and running as soon as i can, swapping the shortblock is the quickest way for me to do it.

MK

I went the idiot route and ran 8-10 psi and 60 shot of nitrous on a stock NA ecu.

The car runs fine on 4-5 psi, but bumping it up was just stupid. But now I KNOW its stupid, its not just speculation.

I now have a rrfpr and am getting the AWIC from SubaruJunkie. I am also going to get a J&S safeguard I think.