I bought me a small tire car
After getting it home I drove it to work (32 miles round trip) and it didn’t make it home. Turns out it needed some love. It had several broken rocker arms, 2 melted plugs. So we went through it and gave it the maintenance. Now it runs properly although I think the motor is really tired (which in fairness Greg told me it was). It has 16 psi of oil pressure at idle when warm and 30 psi going down the road. Not sure why its so low but I have some ideas. First I figured it had too much clearance from being worn out. I cut open the oil filter and it was very clean. Which points to the bearings being ok. Next after some discussion with Greg it turns out he didnt have the lifter bores bushed and it has a hydraulic roller cam. Mopars leak a ton with this set up and will kill oil pressure. Also it might have a defective pressure relief in the oil pump. I have seen this before and honestly it is behaving exactly like that. So the plan is to remove the pan and replace the oil pump. Then remove the intake and prime the oil pump while rotating the motor by hand and observe the leakage past the lifters. If its bad then I will replace the hydraulic lifters with solid offset rollers from my old turbo motor to solve that issue. If that works and the oil pressure is better then we head and out and run it.
After getting it home I drove it to work (32 miles round trip) and it didn’t make it home. Turns out it needed some love. It had several broken rocker arms, 2 melted plugs. So we went through it and gave it the maintenance. Now it runs properly although I think the motor is really tired (which in fairness Greg told me it was). It has 16 psi of oil pressure at idle when warm and 30 psi going down the road. Not sure why its so low but I have some ideas. First I figured it had too much clearance from being worn out. I cut open the oil filter and it was very clean. Which points to the bearings being ok. Next after some discussion with Greg it turns out he didnt have the lifter bores bushed and it has a hydraulic roller cam. Mopars leak a ton with this set up and will kill oil pressure. Also it might have a defective pressure relief in the oil pump. I have seen this before and honestly it is behaving exactly like that. So the plan is to remove the pan and replace the oil pump. Then remove the intake and prime the oil pump while rotating the motor by hand and observe the leakage past the lifters. If its bad then I will replace the hydraulic lifters with solid offset rollers from my old turbo motor to solve that issue. If that works and the oil pressure is better then we head and out and run it.
