Since I had minimal service calls today I took advantage of the free time to pull the motor and tear it down. Based on my visit to McCabe Motorsports earlier in the day I was prepared for the worst. After getting all the preliminary work taken care of I had my son help me pull the motor and tear into it. When we finally got to the timing chain I noticed that it was fairly loose for only having 14k on it. I'm pretty sure that in the process of limping off the Hwy 191 out of Moab to I-70 on 5 cylinders I caused the chain to skip a tooth or more. No other damage indicated other than a couple of slightly bent pushrods.
We both held our breath as we wrestled the bumpstick out of the block expecting to see a shiny stick instead of a cam. We were both amazed at the condition of the lobes. Yeah the #12 lobe is worn down alot, but we really expected all of them to be in really bad shape. This was not the case.
The remaining 10 lifters looked great. The cooresponding lobes for those lifters looked damn good too!
We then pulled the pan and once again I was expecting a thick silvery coating on the bottom. While there was evidence of metallic dust/oil it was not nearly as bad as we thought we'd see. YES!!!
The cylinders got a little coolant in them while we were taking stuff apart so I wiped them down with fresh oil and took a look. No scoring on any of the walls and the cross-hatch from the cylinder hone is still visible. Hopefully you can see it in the pic below.
Based on everything i've read i can say with confidence that I screwed up. How? Simple...Hi-Volume Oil pump installed insted of a standard volume pump. It appears that the amount of oil in the crankcase (1/2 quart extra) has no bearing on where the oil goes....Duh! I'm fairly certain that the lifters on the ends of the block were getting less oil than than they would with a standard pump. I maybe dead wrong, but that's my position and only time and a new camshaft will tell.
I'm still going to try the Crower Cam Saver Lifters and the Crower Baja Brute Cam but I'll be replacing the HV pump with a stock flow Melling.
Rockers will stay stock for now and a new set of straight pushrods will go in as well.
Guess I might as well replace the rear main seal while I'm at it. I figure it will start leaking at the 30 mile mark...it's Jeep thing.:shrug:
A few gaskets and viola'......motor will be ready to return to work.
Anyone seen my red engine paint?
