The story of a 440
I had my engine running so well, It would absolutely
smoke the tires through 3 gears, pull 14 mpg and start with ease, then
one day it all seem to come apart. I had been driving the truck on-road
and off,a couple of times the rad had gotten a little dirty and ran warm,
nothing to major though, I had never overheated it. I had already had a
head gasket problem due to crappy gas and had figured those days were gone,
then one day I was driving along and the motor seemed to be running a little
hot and knocking under load. I stopped to pull out some timing from the
motor, and have a look under the hood, the motor was not being its usual
self, so I proceded home and and tore it down.
What I found was a mashed cam lobe, but I knew
that wasn't the cause just the effect. I looked deeper into the parts and
found
a cracked ring that had some pieces splintered out of
it, I though that maybe the ring had butted and tightened it up, but the
cause was detonation, under closer inspection the piston was cracked and
meausured unevenly around its diameter. The pieces of the ring showed up
in the oil pan, pickup and lifter oil gallery, chunks of piston ring are
pretty hard and due some major damage on their way through an oiling system.
There are some lesson to be learned here:
1. If you insist on running a large bore, high compression
engine like a 440 or a 400 for that matter, be weary of who you buy your
fuel from, I normally have been using Mohawk premium which has a 93 rating.
The truck likes this gas and took all the
timing that I had curved the distributor to with never
a ping. My engine woes started when I ran Petro Canada premium and ESSO
premium in my truck, the only time it would stop pinging and knocking is
when I added 104+ octane boost to this gas which leads me to believe that
either this fuel is not up to par from the refinery, or that the stations
in question are mixing or substituting regular unleaded for premium. It
would not suprise me either to find a large quantity of water in their
fuel which lowers octane ratings of fuel.
2. When running high compression engines, pay attention
to deck heights, quench area and combustion chamber prep. I had
polished combustion chambers but really lousy quench
area, that may have contributed to my knock problem, quench area in a stock
440 is around .200, when ideally it should be .035-.085 . I am a big fan
of head milling and thin head gaskets to raise compression ratio, however
with bores bigger than 4.25, new pistons is the way to go, actually forged
pistons is the way to go,
if you think fuel quality will improve in the future,
you are kidding yourself.
3. If anything goes wrong in the motor, don't patch it.
Start fresh and fix the problem entirely and dont use FRAM oil filters.
I had one of these on the engine when it came apart,
the oil had been changed about 150 miles previous. The reason I doubt
the fram filters is because of where I found parts of
aluminium and piston ring, in the oil galleries. To get into the galleries
the junk had to go through the oil pump which it did(
it was chewed up pretty good), and through the oil filter. I cut the filter
open and found gaps inside the filter where oil could
flow without being filtered. I am now using Parts Master filters which
are
WIX brand and hopefully will be able to find some Puralator
filters for the new motor .
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