3 Ways to Prevent Your Engine from Blowing Up!

Mike foto IQ here today I'm going to give you something that probably all of you want to know three ways not to blow up your engine now blowing up the engine is something that a lot of us enthusiasts fear about and when you modify things and you drive harder uh you do track days you go to the drag strip uh you do some drift days you even start competing uh the chances of you blowing something up gets to be more and more and I'm going to tell you how to avoid those pitfalls so reason number one don't overheat now this might seem pretty obvious but you know like being engine builders we see a lot of busted engines come through here and probably the number one reason that starts them on the uh Hill of decline is overheating now this could be pretty easy like a lot of engines um especially turbocharged cars from the factory a lot of them tend to overheat when you drive them hard on the track like you'll never overheat one probably and anything you can do on the street but take it to the racetrack and if it's a place like Southern California sometimes it gets to 115 120° out in the nasty desert where a lot of our tracks are at and sure enough they overheat now a lot of you want to spend money on fancy goast parts but once it overheats it's all over so we did a whole video on how to avoid overheating but I'll just give you a couple of easy things uh one of them is to install a big racing radiator uh this is just about mandatory if you start increasing the power uh you know we'll get into that a little bit more later but with a turbo carard it's easy to almost double the horsepower and most of them with just boltons and and the tune doubling the horsepower you're basically doubling the heat so make sure you can dissipate it um a good racing radiator is a good cheap insurance a lot cheaper than a blown engine the other thing is an oil cooler um most Factory oil coolers are totally inadequate for track use um they if you if your car has an oil cooler it's probably some little dinky thing but um dissipating that heat the oil is the second thing besides the coolant that draws heat out of your engine now uh what temperatures do you want to avoid we found that um to keep things happy on most cars now I'm saying most cars there's always some exceptions but just about any car you'll be safe if you keep the cooling temperature below 230° and the oil temperature below 250° the reason why we want to keep the cooling temperature below 230 is um you know on every car it varies a little a lot of it depends where the sensor is um how it's picking it up uh which is another thing never believe your stock coolant gauge you want to actually read the actual temperature your engine seeing so a lot of um you you can get an OBD scan tool and actually set set up a dashboard maybe on your phone and have it in the holder up there where you can see it or you want to install like real racing uh gauges so you can monitor the actual temperature um by the time your stock gauge registers that you're overheating a lot of times your engines toast you know those things have a lot of delay in them and they can be 30 40 50° off even um some of the factory gauges only have two positions like overheating and uh normal and they kind of interpolate in between the two so don't trust your factory gauge get a real temperature reading on your engine uh when your cone temperature gets too hot a lot of bad things happen um when it starts getting really hot um your head and your uh block could start distorting um you know like we've seen like as much as uh maybe 12 thou of distortion in between the bolts on the cylinder head for instance uh this is like warpage caused by overheating and you're losing 12,000 of clamp Force what does that mean your head gaskets probably going to blow also we've measured similar Distortion in the deck of the block like up here um a lot of times this Distortion is permanent and can only be cured by taking the engine apart and uh resurfacing things so if you have Distortion in your deck up here and here you can lose like over half the clamp of your head gasket instant blown gasket also when everything starts to distort you lose your ring seal you start getting more blowby more blowby means um more of your oil gets puked out the Breather um that's never good which can lead to oil starvation and other things um when you're running really hot it can also cause a Cascade of messing up so you get hot you get glowing spots in your uh in your uh cylinder head in the combustion chamber that leads to detonation which is a whole another thing that we'll talk about real shortly so basically don't overheat that's your number one thing check out our video on the subject we did a couple of weeks ago we get totally in depth of how to prevent overheating the next thing is a big kind of complicated one number two is don't detonate now detonation is uncontrolled combustion um in your cylinders um that's not controlled by the spark plug and not controlled by your engine ECU now most people call it detonation but you can also hear it called knock or pre-ignition or something the basic causes can be slightly different um between all of them but you know a lot of people want to argue with me about the semantics but it's all the same thing it's uncontrolled combustion going on in your cylinder what's bad about this is the combustion can start at an odd time like as the Piston's coming up to top dead center for instance um you get like a explosion and the piston coming up plus the shock wave of the explosion puts a tremendous amount of force and heat into your cylinder um you know that's what you hear that knocking or pinging noise um you know it could sound like a knock a ping sounds like gravel being rled in the can when it's super bad but all of this is no good if you ever hear it when you're driving like back off uh get off the throttle uh don't drive hard again till you figure out the C of the detonation you know I'm saying this because detonation could destroy your engine in a matter of seconds um some turbocharged cars um detonation can knock you out in just a few knocks especially if you have like a turbo rotary or something doesn't take much to mess one up same thing with the Subaru with stock Pistons just a few knocks when you're full sending on Boost and that's it time to disassemble the engine now you get get this uh these Force shock waves going through your engine put a tremendous load on your uh bearings your Pistons your rods even your crankshaft uh puts a lot of stress like we've seen detonation damage on rod bearings for instance in in an extreme case this doesn't happen very much we've actually seen the main bearings being um showing signs of distress like we haven't seen a spun main bearing yet due to detonation but we've certainly seen uh overload indications on the mains of an engine that's been detonating bad um some of the other things is that uh it can erode your uh valves and fissure your valves it'll cut right through it like the temperature and pressure wave and uh you'll lose your valve seal uh most commonly you see damage on the Piston the Piston gets uh you know like I guess like a not too severe detonation is like a uh sanded texture so you'll see something that looks like someone sand blasted your piston it'll usually start on the um exhaust side of your piston if it's really bad it'll be all over the whole piston but generally detonation damage starts on the exhaust valve side so you'll see some sand blasting you know that's a sign that your engine's been detonating uh you can also see the sand blast damage um on the exhaust valve side it'll be typically it'll be on the edges of the combustion chamber on the exhaust valve side um on the sharp edges you'll see this sand blasted texture that's an engine that's been detonating but hasn't broken anything yet when it gets really bad uh the Piston will actually Flex it'll get really hot Flex bend down and it'll trap the uh compression Rings making the Rings uh stick and you'll lose compression really severe cases um you'll actually break the first few ring lands and uh that'll render your rings not operational um I've even seen super severe detonation on like perhaps nitrous Motors or Turbo Motors that got a load of bad gas or a failed injector uh it actually looks like a cutting torch cut through the edge of the piston and totally wiped everything out if you ever get detonation that bad it's rebuild time for sure and hopefully it hasn't messed up your block and you could still clean up the barar um other detonation uh damage is you can see sometimes the uh piston pin is blued underneath the Piston Crown is uh discolored uh your bearings are hammered particularly the uh top part um the bearings are really really prone to damage cuz they're uh soft metal and if you exceed the load bearing capacity of the hydrodynamic film guess what your bearings get chewed up so donation is bad juju you don't want to have any of that going on at all in your engine that's driven um you know rigorously like in Motorsports or even honing around somewhere how do you avoid detonation detonation is caused by too much cylinder pressure and that could be caused by a number of things it's usually too much of things you think are good so too much boost pressure um too much ignition Advance uh those are the main causes of um detonation that that we've seen uh it could also be caused by running too lean another common cause is um insufficient octane of whatever fuel you're using um all this are some of the common causes of detonation there's also a lot of user induced causes of detonation um for instance the big one is running the wrong heat range spark plugs now your spark plugs um all have heat ranges and uh your stock plug you know since the manufacturer doesn't want the plug to foul out and normal driving uh they have a long heat path of the center electrode out through the shell um this is the whole another subject I'm just going to go over it real quick so basically the the nose of the uh Center electrode stays hot and you don't get any of that carbon fouling on it um the bad thing about it is it takes it's hard to conduct heat out and the uh plug can get really hot start glowing real red hot and even melt when it starts glowing red hot um it can act like a glow plug in the diesel and Trigger uncontrolled combustion and detonation so you got to make sure you have a cold enough plug now colder plugs have a shorter heat path out of the center electrode and um they run a lot cooler so you're less likely for that to happen uh the disadvantage is that if you sit around idling your car all the time they're more likely to F foul out um so like let's say you have a tuned turbo motor um you should at least do one heat range colder maybe two heat ranges colder before you go out on the track um if you have a really built na motor and you've increased the compression ratio you know like one or two points you should at least have one heat range colder maybe two so pay attention to your plug heat range it's a big thing that a lot of people Overlook and we've seen it blow up more than a few um warmed over Motors now if your engine is totally stock you probably don't need to worry about it but you know once you start modifying things particularly on a turbo engine look out and pay attention to that um make sure you have enough fuel pressure always like uh intermittently leaning out is another cause of detonation we've seen on track driven cars um a lot of it is you don't have a good fuel pickup your car leans out in the corners or um you have enough fuel pump capacity and enough uh big enough fuel lines that when you do a dyal pole like one pole in tuning uh you have sufficient fuel pressure but when you rip through all the gears um your pump can't keep up and you start leaning out um you know that's another thing don't lean out um also make sure you have enough injector um this isn't as common but lot of times when you put bigger injectors your pump has a hard time keeping up with the volume that the injectors um suck up so you know make sure your fuel system is solid having good enough gas um a lot of what happens is um a lot of people like to run pump gas but their tuner is trying to stretch that pump gas or every bit of power um it can make and you can hardly blame the tuner because everybody talks and if one tuner doesn't make as much power as the other tuner well guess what he's going to lose business so every tuner tries to get the best results um you know and pump gas isn't the best thing for running on the track um it it it tends to detonate especially uh States like California that have oxygenated gas so a lot of these fuels have a lot of what's called light ends and light ends are simple volatile hydrocarbons that burn really easy and U these things help reduce your HC emissions so some fuel like California probably New York or any of those super liberal places probably have a lot of those things in your fuel now uh these fuels the light ends um you know they ignite easy but they're also really easy to ignite as uh pre-ignition and detonation so it's not too good to push your car to the limit on these um so if you're going to the track it might be good to get some 100 octane unlet race gas and maybe mix a few gallons if your car has been tuned on uh pump gas that that gives you like a little bit of protection uh the other thing you might want to consider is setting your car up to run Flex Fuel and run E85 now e E85 is a tremendous track fuel uh your car will run probably 10 to 15° cooler and you have a lot more dention margin I I've uh been tuning some cars on E85 and we've been able to advance the timing so far that the power falls off with uh no detonation so E85 is a good field to run for the track um same thing with e98 or any of the ethanol based fuels but E85 is cheap easy to get in Most states and uh with flex fuel you can uh run the 85 on the track and then gas on the street um and have the best of both worlds there the last thing that's the big cause of detonation is your tuner now a lot of you have uh turbo cars and probably a lot of you have a tune in there now the tuner is usually a businessman and uh all tuners are under pressure to get really good results and you can hardly blame them also some tun tuners are a lot better than others a lot of guys are um guys that buy the tuning license uh from HP tuners or eitech or something and they go in there and they just crank up the Boost and uh crank up the advance Le it out do a hero Dino Run and send you on your way uh the best tuners are actually like really smart guys that have a deep intellectual understanding of combustion fuels engines engine Theory uh you know I kind of call these guys calibrators and um they really think about your tune and try to make a tune that'll serve you best in the way you're going to use the car now um you know your typical uh hot dude tuner will just like tune your car to do one hero Dino pull send you on the way but you know guess what like when you're on the track you're a wide open throttle for you know as much as a minute you know like you'll you'll spend a minute easy at wide open throttle on the minute 30 second track um and you're going to be through all the gears um at at Full Throttle a dino pull is like uh you know maybe 15 seconds through a fourth gear or something uh so you're going to get a lot more heat in your engine uh your combustion temperatures are going to be higher and they're going to be maintained you're going to get a lot more heat everywhere so um you know a tune that didn't detonate on a dino pole um is could be like uh death on the track so pick your tuner carefully make sure he has experience with tuning track cars and maybe has a record of tuning some track cars that have run successfully and uh be careful um even if you get a tuner that's like one of these one gear hero dudes and you tune on pump gas you know if you slip uh you know like maybe 30% race gas in there you'll probably still be safe so that's good insurance so number two don't detonate if you keep your car from detonating it's going to live a long time on the track As Long as You Follow rule number three so rule number three which is the last of the big three is don't run out of oil now you wouldn't believe how many times uh we've seen a car that's come here and it's total oil starvation like it usually has a rod knock um that's if the guy's lucky if he's unlucky there's a rod out the side of the block um all engines burn oil um so even under normal conditions the piston rings um you know it's their job to keep the oil in the car's bottom end and not in the combustion chamber so you have your oil ring and you have your compression rings and they all like work to scrape the oil off the cylinder walls and not let in the combustion chamber but no matter how good your rings are some of that oil will still get in there and get burned um you know like if you're driving on the street U most cars won't even burn a quarter oil in your normal oil change interval um it's in the manufacturer's best interest to be like that cuz oil in the combustion chamber is um you know hydrocarbons out the exhaust and makes it difficult to meet emission standards um but when you're driving on the track at high RPM those rings have a lot more work you know it's one thing to keep your cylinder walls and the comus AER free of oil at 3,000 RPM but if you're at 7 or 8,000 RPM all the time you're really increasing the amount amount of work that the Rings have to do uh to keep oil out so uh burning more oil is very common on the track and you you can expect to burn two or three times more another thing um that you have to consider is when you're running on the track at high RPM and Full Throttle all the time is you get more Blow by now even if you have really good Rings um you get combustion gas past the ring especially on the turbo engine when you're running boost pressure and everything the these rings are holding back a lot of pressure and on the street you don't see that much but when you're on Boost on throttle all the time uh you get a lot more blowby we call it and uh your crank case pressure goes up so your crank case vent system has to deal with a lot more pressure um so your PCV and your crank vents are uh the blowby is going out and when everything's spinning around your engine in high RPM there's like a lot of entrapped oil with all that blowby gas we call it windage so a lot of that oil it's also getting blown out of your breathers um you know that's why we talk about if you have a turbocharged car having an air oil separator is pretty good that can return oil um back to the pan now a lot of you guys that track turbo cars um you've probably if you run a catch can for instance you probably notied that your catch can can completely fill up in one track session so you know that's like a pint or a quarter oil getting kicked out and that's not even including what your PCV might have sucked up or you know you take off your uh charge pipes for instance and then you'll notice your intercooler is full of oil now this doesn't necessarily mean something's wrong with your engine but it's kind of like part of the game when you're tracking a turbo car or you know like a hot naturally aspirated car that you're winding up so it's imperative that after every single session you when you come off the track you need to check your oil level and uh sometimes you might be a quart low or even more uh you also probably want to empty all your catch cans and keep track of how much is getting blown out every session um uh you know like watch your oil like a hawk uh you know like watch it every single session um and then you know fill your oil up you might want to make sure you fill all the way up to the top of your full on your dipstick but you don't want to go past full um what can happen then is uh your crank counter weights and stuff will start dipping into your oil um uh cuz your crank case is too too full and it'll like whip the oil up into the windage cloud make more oil flying around uh it'll also froth up your oil frothy oil doesn't lubricate as good um all that splashing and whipping around increases your oil temp a lot so don't overfill but keep it full full another thing is to uh have a really high quality synthetic oil uh M one's good Royal purple's good good mul's good red line but you want to make sure it's 100% synthetic and it's the highest grade um like all that all that uh load and temperature breaks down oil fast and uh mineral oils break down way quicker than synthetics um synthetics like if you have any kind of something sketchy in your oiling system can sometimes save your ass if you look at Moto IQ we have some articles about about things like that um but you know make sure you have a really good oil make sure your oil is fresh um you know like I say that for a turbocharged car you probably want to change your oil every event if you have a naturally aspirated um car I would say you should want to change it every two events so I consider an event like a Saturday and a Sunday so maybe that's six sessions um six to eight sessions so uh one event maybe uh 6 to8 sessions turbo car change your oil U naturally aspirated car uh 14 16 sessions something like that change your oil um it might seem like an Overkill but um it'll pay off in in the long run now you want to keep your oil temperature we mentioned before uh below 250° so there's some reasons for that the first reason is um most oils typically start to degrade around 250° uh especially mineral oils like synthetics they don't degrade or oxidize till maybe higher like in the 300s but um you know why push it now at high temperatures uh the oil wants to combine with oxygen and it'll oxidize and it'll form like that gross black sludge that uh sticks to everything and doesn't lubricate and causes your um piston rings to stick and uh bearings to spin and all that so you never want to get into that zone a good oil cooler will keep you out of there um the other reason that people don't talk about too much but it's uh probably the most important reason to me is um your engine bearings are uh made out of soft Metals with uh low melting point they're usually like leads aluminums coppers uh Alloys of of of them you know like if you ever messed around and made fishing shot or something you know like you can melt lead in your saucepan on the stove even and uh the best bearings still have lead in them uh even stuff like aluminum has a fairly low melting point but what I'm getting at is um these these metal even if you're not running them at their melting point they still lose a lot of their loadbearing capacity like aluminum loses more than half its strength at 350° for instance so you want to keep that oil um below the point where those Metals start to uh I guess well it's kind of complicated but to keeps things simple I'll say before they start getting soft um most bearings espec especially like nowadays uh they start to lose their loadbearing capacity at about 250° now there's guys that want to argue with me about that but I've seen OEM data about and I used to be an oem engineer so we used to try to design things around that um nowadays there's a big push to remove heavy metals from engines so they remove like a lot of the good alloying elements and uh they removing lead and things like that from the bearings so the modern um Greener bearings have even less load bearing capacity and they start to soften at lower temperatures so 250 is a good safe Point uh maximum point for most engines you don't want to exceed that or you can get into the zone of spun bearings so you want to run a good oil cooler you also want to have a good way of monitoring ing your oil oil temperature so you want to have a good Cinder unit like in your pan plus uh you know like a gauge or something and watch that oil temp um finally there's mods to your oiling system now um if you're running a close to stock car you probably don't need to worry about this so if you're running stock Street compound tires of the stock size and you have stock suspension uh you're probably safe but you know like you know if you're on our Channel you probably can't resist that urge to modify so a lot of you have uh bigger tires our compound sticky DOT tires um sure a lot of you have trick suspension Trick Alignment settings a lot of you might even have arrow and and compete like in time attack or Grassroots Motorsports a lot of you probably drift and uh drifting even though it's at lower g-forces um still uh generates a lot of U Back and Forth load now what you got to worry about is your oil slashing around in your pan exposing your pickup and your uh oil pump and everything momentarily sucks air and when this happens you lose the hydrodynamic film of oil that's protecting your uh your bearings um you do that these bearings are made out of such soft low melting point Alloys that if you have metal to metal contact even um for a second or two uh you get microw welding and uh you know bad things happen from there uh you'll have total bearing failure after a few times and you'll leave spin a bearing usually you spin your rod bearing that's when the bearing um like seizes to the crank cuz it's gone too soft and almost molten so it'll stick to the crank drink and it'll spin in the rod um when you spin the bearing your oiling holes don't line up anymore and you lose all your oil pressure and then in seconds uh the thing will start glowing red hot and there goes your crank and if you keep going uh your big in of the rod will start to get super hot and weaken and then your Rod bolts break and that's the end of your engine usually the rod goes out of the side of your block and you have a pretty expensive bill so you want to avoid sucking up air at all costs now once you start getting into that point um I guess the first thing to do is to get uh a really good oil pressure gauge like don't trust your stock one if your car has one and uh you want to have some kind of data loging capability now there's apps on your phone that can do that um yeah you know it's it's going to require a little bit of configuration am makes a little uh logger but do something where you can keep track of your oil pressure and if you see your oil pressure dip even the slightest uh it's time to invest in some things to prevent that um one of the things is to get a higher capacity oil pan now this is a gry one for an SR20 it kind of bolts onto the stock upper pan it adds about a Port more capacity um I took out some of the baffles but it has baffles to keep the oil around the oil pickup and to uh help get the oil from These Wings Over closer to the pickup um dep depending on your engine um you know like if you have a baffles with trap doors that allow the oil to go in but not out around the uh pump pickup that's all good good uh you know it's really common in like maybe like LS high performance pans to have that if they don't make a pan for your engine uh it's not super difficult to have a fabricator maybe modify your pan with baffles and uh and uh more capacity uh the other thing you can do is add a windage tray uh the windage tray um and the crank scraper helps uh strip that windage cloud away from your spin around crank gets that oil and returns it to your sump so your stump oil level stays more consistent also with a lot uh less oil flying around your oil consumption goes down and your oil temperature drops I mean I've seen a good windage trade drop the oil temp like 10 to 15° um so those things can really help keep your engine supplied with oil and reduce your chances of bearing failure um if you still see your oil pressure drop uh what you could do for a kind of a cheaper solution is get an acus sump an Acu sump is a uh accumulator that keeps your engine um fed with oil in case uh the pickup sucks sucks some air so it's basically like a big bottle with a floating piston you have pressurized air on one side and your oil pump fills up the the bottle with oil and when your oil pressure drops that oil gets squished into your engine and uh it keeps it from running totally dry um you know the acusum B doesn't cure everything like it won't prevent your oil pressure from dipping but like let's say if your oil pressure was hitting zero uh it'll at least keep your oil pressure up to like 15 20 psi uh the other bad thing about the acusum is that it can only feed your your engine for like maybe 3 or 4 seconds so if you're in a long long turn the acus stump will run dry and then your oil pressure will be a few PSI low while the uh oil pump works extra hard to fill the acusum back up but if you have momentarily um low oil pressure it can save your ass it doesn't cost that much and it's not that hard to hook up I've had a lot of success with these in drift cars for instance because they have a lot of uh momentary spikes where they lose oil pressure due to the you know violent back and forth things now if you've really modified your car and like let's say your car is capable of pulling like 1.2 or 1.5 G's even and more than that for several seconds like in sustained Corner about the only thing that's going to keep your engine um from losing oil pressure is a a dry sump um so if you have like a formula car for instance or you have like an unlimited class time attack car with slicks and big arrow that like maybe Andrew brilliant or something designed your arrow um you're going to need a dry stump um that is if you want your engine to be happy and live now a dry stump is a external pump that is uh like a super pump like it sucks everything out of the crank case uh it sucks out the blage Cloud uh sucks up every bit of oil so the crank case is dry and that's why they call it a dry St um it gets this uh oil puts it to a remote tank the remote tank has elaborate air oil separators and and and stuff so it gets all the air out and you're putting a nice clean unari oil like at full pressure into your engine all the time no matter you know how high your revs and no matter how hard your G's are um dry sumps are a big secret to long life and they're expensive but you know if every every one of our customers had a dry sump it would probably cut down the failures by like probably 20% or something um so a dry sump is the most expensive but the your last line to defense to have really good oil to your bearings so you know those are the big three take care of those and you'll have a lot of fun you'll spend more time driving less time fixing I guarantee it and you might have to invest a little bit of money but uh your engine's probably the most expensive part of your car and anytime you break that less or make it last longer you're actually saving a lot of money um as a final thing if you do blow up your engine what's probably the most important thing is you got to conduct an autopsy of it figure out why it blew up and then do the necessary mods so you don't repeat the same thing um we'll probably do a video on how to do an autopsy on your engine at a future time but uh you know make sure you figure out what the root cause of your engine failure was and don't repeat it so if you like our content be sure and subscribe I try to bring you the best tech that I can think of that's the most practical um go to moto iq.com we have like probably thousands of articles there that you can read and they're all Tech heavy you can probably read there for years if you're so inclined um this is our part store um the links below um you know we have competitive prices on most of the parts we talk about uh and the proceeds help us produce better content if you like my uh sick hoodie and other Moto IQ merch um you could uh also get our merch at the web store so um I hope this stuff all helps you if you follow um everything I said religiously and avoid failures due to the big three you'll be thanking me so until next time uh have fun out there

Channel: MotoIQ

Views: 107,445

Keywords: motoiq

Id: v4CRTPGP5M0

Length: 40min 20sec (2420 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 29 2023