I got the car on the ramp before lunch and dropped the small undertray to take a look at the damage and some pictures. The engine will be removed next week and Andy has undertaken to photograph it on the stand before he starts to disassemble it, but until then this is as much as we can see.
Andy found #4 little end and gudgeon pin on top of the bellhousing (not sure how we all missed that on Saturday):
Even just lifting the car it's obvious the sump has seen better days (even with my photography!):
On getting the car up in the air we could immediately see a bit of a hole under the exhaust manifold looking at where the bellhousing meets the block:
The same hole from the other side of the crossover pipe:
The other side of the block is not quite so bad, but you can see the oil pickup has taken a beating in this pic:
This is looking up #4 cylinder bore. It's not the best picture, but I couldn't get it quite right. Both sides of the bore are missing and there is something at the top that may be part of the piston crown:
We still don't know exactly what happened, but it appears that #4 piston broke up as it is almost completely missing. Once the piston was broken we think the little end was snapped off with the gudgeon pin because it flailed around. The sump was cracked because the remainder of the con rod has been beating on the bottom of it as the crank rotated. The crank is complete and while one big end bolt has a missing head the big end itself is still attached leading us to think that the head was sheared by impact with other broken components rather than contributing to the failure; if the fastener had failed first then the big end would have come apart completely. Turning over the engine the other 3 cylinders still have compression.
All the pics will be in a new collection on my fotopic site http://fen.fotopic.net once Fotopic have satisfied themselves they are not adult in nature.
Andy found #4 little end and gudgeon pin on top of the bellhousing (not sure how we all missed that on Saturday):
Even just lifting the car it's obvious the sump has seen better days (even with my photography!):
On getting the car up in the air we could immediately see a bit of a hole under the exhaust manifold looking at where the bellhousing meets the block:
The same hole from the other side of the crossover pipe:
The other side of the block is not quite so bad, but you can see the oil pickup has taken a beating in this pic:
This is looking up #4 cylinder bore. It's not the best picture, but I couldn't get it quite right. Both sides of the bore are missing and there is something at the top that may be part of the piston crown:
We still don't know exactly what happened, but it appears that #4 piston broke up as it is almost completely missing. Once the piston was broken we think the little end was snapped off with the gudgeon pin because it flailed around. The sump was cracked because the remainder of the con rod has been beating on the bottom of it as the crank rotated. The crank is complete and while one big end bolt has a missing head the big end itself is still attached leading us to think that the head was sheared by impact with other broken components rather than contributing to the failure; if the fastener had failed first then the big end would have come apart completely. Turning over the engine the other 3 cylinders still have compression.
All the pics will be in a new collection on my fotopic site http://fen.fotopic.net once Fotopic have satisfied themselves they are not adult in nature.
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