[Healeys] (no subject)

[Perry]

Come on you guys. Unless the block has ben treated to a more modern pressurized timing chain tensioner…what you are looking at is the remains of the large flat O ring that serves as the timing chain tensioner on 100’s.  Bet the cam timing is off a bit too!
Perry

Sent from Mail for Windows 10

From: Michael Oritt
Sent: Sunday, September 24, 2017 6:04 PM
To: Austin Healey; Michael Clifford JR
Subject: [Healeys] (no subject)

There has been a slow, gradual decline in my engine's oil pressure for a while now--60 to 65 psi on start-up from cold dropping at running temperatures to 30-35 psi at 3K rpm's and 10 psi or less at fast idle. Yesterday I took the car for a long ride and after a while at 65-70 mph the oil pressure actually dropped below 30 psi, so it's now officially below the "10 psi/1K rpm's" threshold. 

The engine has about 60K on it since complete rebuild so this morning I decided to bite the bullet and drop the sump with the hope that I will find nothing worse than a worn oil pump and/or main or rod bearings, either of which I can repair/replace in time for some fall driving. 

I first removed the spin-on oil filter and upon cutting it apart noticed a bit of black plastic debris--irregularly shaped pieces, almost gravel-like perhaps 1/16" to 1/8" in dimension on one end of the cartridge. The filter medium itself was fairly clean though I did notice a bit more shiny bearing-like material than I would have liked to have seen.

While draining the pan I heard a clunk or two from some solids going through the drain hole and landing in a catch pan and on examination I found a couple of larger pieces of the same kind of stuff--definitely some black plastic material, not particularly hard as it would give when bitten. 

The big surprise was what I found when I removed the pan--a lot more of the same small stuff and four segments of a black plastic piece. In the attached thumbnail you'll see that they form a semi-circle about 5" in diameter and notice on the two pieces in the 9 o'clock position that there appears to have been some gear-like teeth molded in. The small debris is inside the semi-circle.

I'm going to remove the oil pump tomorrow but wonder if anyone has an idea as to what this stuff could be?

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://autox.team.net/pipermail/healeys/attachments/20170924/0154f34d/attachment.html>