What I Found After Tearing Down My SVT Lightning Engine & Looking Inside! CARNAGE ALERT!

previously on legit street cars i showed you guys how to clean pistons using a wax string i also cleaned up the cylinder heads on my svt lightning and everything was going great well at least that's how i made it look in the video the reality was deep down inside i was not doing great [Music] cl65 alex alex we gotta record dude oh yeah okay get it together get it together come on all right all right so now we're gonna clean up the cylinder head with some good old carbon choke cleaner [Music] come on dude we gotta do it gotta finish the video just another another you know while filming that video i found catastrophic damage to my svt lightning engine and since the video was about showing you how to clean the engine and the damage didn't affect that i sucked it up put a smile on my face and continued on so in this video i'm going to remove my svt lightning engine put it on a stand fully disassemble it and see if there's anything we can save and then after that we're going to celebrate because i have a bad engine that just means i can make it go much faster so i was bummed for yeah like about one second after i found what i'm gonna show you guys but then i'm like wait a minute wait a minute we can build a forged motor and then get a ported blower and and then i went out and got a ported blower let me show you so like within 24 hours of finding out that my engine's basically screwed i went and got this a used ported blower it needs to be repainted um but yeah this thing is all ported the upper intake the blower and then this is filled with epoxy so now the lightning is gonna do one of these every time i rev it up even at idle it's gonna what so originally i was just gonna replace the head gaskets then i got the heads off and i'm like i gotta do some long tube headers and i wasn't really planning on building the motor but i definitely wanted to and not that i needed an excuse but this just makes me feel so much better i'm just hoping we can reuse the block that would be nice the block and the crank that's all i want that's all i want from you five four and i was going to do this part anyway even if i wasn't going to build the motor because i was going to replace the oil pan gasket and the engine mounts but now we're going to get it on the engine stand flip it around and be able to replace everything this thing is going to be sweet this transmission is absolutely ginormous i believe this is the same trans that was in the uh super duty diesel trucks at the time they needed something that could hold up and a big transmission out of a diesel truck would definitely work for that there we go yay it's out all right you guys want to see it you want to see what i found in that video before i show you who actually saw it in the previous video because there is maybe like one or two seconds in a frame where you can see it sort of and a couple guys saw like literally two out of like a couple hundred thousand saw it so let me know in the comment section if you know what it is right now no cheating and here it is here is the issue with my engine right there we're missing something right right there's a little void it's it's larger than the rest that is the piston the piston has come apart you can actually see the ring in there that's kind of mangled as well so we're gonna get a much better look at this carnage once we pop this piston out here in a few minutes but the cylinder wall may have been damaged a little bit and i think it can be honed and bored out and fixed but we won't know until we kind of disassemble like everything and just get a really good look at it another reason why i want to just rebuild this engine anyway is there is a decent amount of cylinder scoring here as you can see so this thing was just overall not in the best of condition if you guys have been around since the beginning of the lightning series you know that we had a lot of rust in the block as well it took me like 20 coolant flushes to get it sort of clean it's still rusty in there so there are just a lot of things pointing to this is an excellent candidate to rebuild and now this one is staring us in the face saying rebuild me rebuild me i just pulled the piston up a little bit more so you can see it and then yeah if we go all the way down and you can really see the rings are just destroyed look at that so there was definitely some detonation that happened with this motor but yeah right in here you can see see that right there there's some scoring in the cylinder a lot of them are scored up look at right in here too you can see so anyway let's get this huge transmission off and get the engine on a stand i wonder if keeps would regrow the piston let's give that a try uh i guess it's just for your head well apparently putting keeps on the dome of a piston won't prevent piston loss but it can help the two out of three men by the age of 35 who experience some form of male pattern baldness like me so keeps is a subscription service that makes treating male pattern baldness easy and affordable by keeping everything online and it's as easy as a few drops on your head getting started with keeps is super easy just go to keeps.com legit once you're there you're gonna answer a few simple questions consult with a real doctor from the comfort of your own home come up with a game plan and then keeps gets shipped automatically and discreetly to your home and the results speak for themselves guys if you've been procrastinating about finally treating your male pattern baldness do not delay the earlier you get started with this the better it works and if you click on my link down below keeps.com legit you're going to get 50 off your first order so no more excuses don't wait until your dome looks like my bad piston all right let's disconnect this transmission from the engine whoa peter whoa i got excited you did i mean jeez i want to get to this motor too but okay now let's get this starter off well someone's definitely been in there look at this torque converter nut it's kind of mangled i think they tried to remove those converter nuts through the starter which is what i was thinking too but there is a nice rubber plug here that gives you access to the converter nuts oh this is perfect thank you ford thank you so much you're the best i mean many parts of this engine don't hold up very well but you're the best for giving us this little plug all right first converter nut all right so there's six of these this is the last one so far so good nice all right last thing you want to do is strip out torque converter nuts but we are golden all right it's time to remove this transmission all right separate there we go [Music] all right let's get this thing out of here and we will put it on the stand i'm excited to see what the oil looks like too and to see if the bearings the rod bearings got beat up because clearly this was detonation so aside from melting and breaking pistons you can also beat up the bearings pretty good so i'm curious to see what those look like and the common failure point with these motors once you add a little bit of boost and power are the rods the rods can break and we didn't have that we had kind of an uncommon failure i guess but a bad tune will destroy any pistons even forged ones all right we got some writing here on the flex plate o20702 yeah let's get this flex plate off all right we're gonna remove the flex plate right now and on a lot of these you don't have to mark anything but i just like to put stuff back together the way it came apart and we're going to scribe that too because we probably have to send this crank out i'm just going to make a little line here and we'll do the same here at the back of the crank there we go and now it looks like we have a little spacer plate there and let's take a look at this rear main it definitely had a little bit of seepage there nothing too crazy but it'll be nice to get a new one in there all right the last time i used the engine stand was for the caprice and it looks like we'll be able to use these same bolts that we used on that one too same thread and everything all right so you got to be smarter than the stand always bring the stand up to the engine and this is always missing so cutoff head bolt works [Music] she's landed excellent our first ford motor on a stand here at legit street cars something tells me this this won't be the last so i just use old head bolts to lift our engine out in the front so we're gonna be putting studs in this motor so these have bolts we can use for a tool so lift the engine out supposed to replace these anyway so they're garbage these self levelers are really nice i highly recommend them you can move it around so that your engine is flat especially when you're taking it out with the trans you can move it all the way to one end and then the trans will come out sort of even it's still going to drag it down a little bit but these are really nice all right and then another great add-on if you're doing engine work is one of these drain pans so it fits in right here and then we flip the engine over there's gonna be some drippage from oil and coolant that's left over so this will catch it now let's get these hoses off of the oil cooler so these are coolant hoses that go into this housing and keep the oil in check on some cars they have a thermostat for this system so that the oil warms up to a certain temperature quickly because you want your oil to be at the proper operating temperature having super cooled engine oil is definitely not good that's why you're not supposed to beat on a car until you've gotten that oil up to operating temperature so i said it's fine to break the seal of hoses that have been on for a long time possible these have never been off this truck only has 85 000 miles and if you guys missed it in the last video i found out from a subscriber who ran the vin that this engine was replaced in 2003 when the lightning had only 400 miles it had a bottom end noise and that's why we have the updated cylinder heads with the eight threads per spark plug um they had an issue with the four threads where they would pop spark plugs out all right we're gonna flip this engine over and at this point you're gonna see why this drain pan is so nice oh look at that nasty coolant i flushed this thing so many times and it's still got that rust look to it well because it's literally got rust in it there we go all right so next up we're going to remove the engine mounts which look to be in really good shape so all of this is just kind of flaking off but there's nothing wrong with the actual rubber so these solid rubber mounts can last like the lifetime of the vehicle in some cases it's the hydraulic-filled mounts that usually have issues so easy with the engine out so i don't know if i'm going to do poly engine mounts or not i'm really not a big fan of transferring a bunch of vibration into the cab but let me know in the comments section if you guys have one of these ford truck engines with the poly mounts is it worth it is it too shaky inside i don't know i got them on the turbo trans am and they're not that bad but i don't think we need to replace them because of deficiencies and strength these are going to hold up fine so i'm stripping this down to a bare block because we have to send it out just hoping it can be reused i'm sure it can be so this is a really nice gasket right here awesome so i don't know if these have too many issues leaking when you see these really nice thick ones with the rubber o-rings built in they're usually pretty good but anything can get brittle and start to leak so i'm glad we're replacing this that's for sure this looks to be a little difficult to do with the engine inside the cab something else i'm really happy about is being able to clean all this look at this uh this is so bad i don't know if we would have ever been able to flush this out okay so it's oil pan time right now so we're getting closer to pulling these rods and pistons out getting closer to some more carnage i'm really excited to see what the rings look like because they they look melted [Music] and although this carnage is gonna cost me a little bit it's still fun to see all right i've already accepted it it's bad i get to build it we might as well enjoy some carnage maybe we'll have something to hang up on the wall who knows so easy with the engine out all right let's see we got the bottom of the oil pan so we're gonna have a little bit of cooling in here just from this thing being disassembled and coolant kind of leaking all over the place i'm not worried about that um we have sludge again this thing has been disassembled now for a while with coolant leaking everywhere so i'm not really too concerned about this we don't have any metal i don't feel any metal at all yeah i don't really see any shiny glittery stuff okay all right cool not bad oh and i gotta mention the massive sail on sonic tools real quick because it ends in a few days but they are having a blowout father's day sale up to 30 percent off these tools are great i've been using them for about a year now here at legit street quarters and one of my favorite parts is the tool organization from sonic so it comes with these foam liners and they're all labeled so you always know where your tools go these tools come with a lifetime warranty and you don't have to wait for a tool truck any longer in some cases you can just send a picture in of the broken tool and they'll mail you a new one in 24 hours so i'll leave a link down below check out sonic tools another very nice gasket ford i like it it's getting replaced that's for sure but these are sweet let's remove the pickup next and i think you can replace the oil pump with the oil pan on you just have to be really sneaky with probably just this one here i think you can access this guy on the ls engines i've done you always put a magnet in this area just in case it falls all right let's pop this guy out we have an o-ring and let's see how bad this o-ring is you guys watch my mercedes content then a couple of years ago someone had made a video about the pickup o-ring for the m113k engine that's in my e55 and a bunch of other cars would get hard and cause oil pressure issues and that is not the case for this and honestly i don't think it was the case for the mercedes either i think that was really rare i had never seen an issue with that before in my life yeah this o-ring looks good all right let's remove our crank sprocket and this is only going to go on one way because it's key weight so we don't have to worry about anything there and now we can remove our factory ford oil pump and i read online that you can use the gt500 oil pump on this engine and it's a higher volume higher flow pump and it works well in the lightning engines especially after you build them up so we're definitely going to do that it's only like 80 bucks or something too so a nice little upgrade and since we're gonna need to turn the crank we could just put the bolt back in but a 32 millimeter six point fits perfectly over and it uses that keyway and we're not applying any real force to anything at this point it'll be really easy to spin the motor so at this point we're going to start from the back so we'll just expose both of these sets of rod bolts here and i believe this is an 11 yep an 11 mil there we go and i'm gonna say these fine-tooth ratchets from sonic are absolutely amazing some of the best ratchets i've ever used all right so i'll go ahead and take these bolts out and there we go very nice let's take a look at this bearing that's in great shape 85 000 miles looking really nice so these are cracked connecting rods so if you look here at the side profile this isn't perfect at all it literally looks like it was cracked and these connecting rods are made as one piece and then they are precision cracked so they don't just cut them flat they break the connecting rod and then the two pieces fit together perfectly it's kind of like a fingerprint no two connecting rods are going to be the same because of this method and because these fit together perfectly it adds a lot to the strength of the connecting rod so even though the connecting rods are the weak point of the svt lightning it's not because the caps are coming apart all right at this point we're going to remove this connecting rod and piston and you'll see a lot of guys smack this with the other end of the hammer which is fine but for the initial removal off the crank i like to use my two fingers here like this so we're protecting the journal of the crank because the last thing you want to do is have it halfway down and then it smacks the crank journal and causes a scratch once it gets to this point we're pretty much clear as far as it damaging anything in a lot of cases you can just use your hands to push this entire thing out so i'm not hitting it with anything i'm literally just pushing there we go it's a boy it's a boy all right now at this point i'm going to turn the piston on the wrist pin so that we have full control of the other end of the rod we don't want to just scrape it down the cylinder wall okay not a lot of clearance there but you can do it you can get it out without scratching anything it's hard to see on camera but this connecting rod has 590 written on it if you see here this end does not have the 590 stand so you know this connecting rod cap goes this way and this is really cool you can see the crack and it's perfect right there so if you have it off a little bit slide it in it's got to basically disappear you know you're good when you really can barely see it so that's how you put the cap back and then these pistons are marked with a little arrow i didn't clean all of them because these are essentially junk pistons at this point there we go and this arrow is going to point to the front of the engine so you can't really mess this up when you're putting it back together you got your arrow right there and then it would go back in just like this another bit of svt lightning technology that's used in a lot of engines is a full floating wrist pin so this is our wrist pin here and some engines have a semi floating wrist pin where it's fixed in the rod and it pivots in the piston but as you can see here if we hold this it'll pivot independently on the wrist pin and it spins also in the piston so this is a full floating wristband check out the condition of this piston it was coated some of the coating has come off that's pretty typical at 85 000 miles this isn't really in that bad of shape but yeah you can see here the coating is pretty much all gone where it matters but overall the rings look good we have the bottom oil ring and then the two top compression rings and when you set these back up you don't ever want it to look like that these have to be opposite of each other all right let's get through these rods and pistons we only have a couple left to go before we get to our suspect and by suspect i mean completely destroyed and melted piston another perfectly good bearing so just remember when you're pushing this down you can use two hands you can use two fingers get it past the crank that's the most important part oh wow look at this we found another messed up piston oh that is chewed up wow i didn't see that from the top this piston is not good so this one was about to blow out the ring land so typically when you have detonation you blow out the ring land which is this part of the piston all the way around here and then it just exposes this top compression ring and this was getting eaten alive look at this this is just rough like 80 grit sandpaper it's literally got chunks coming out engine carnage i love it i love it you're getting replaced little buddy that's right all right let's just take a look at the crank journal here and it's looking really nice can't feel anything which is expected after taking a look at those bearings so so far so good i mean we definitely had a little bit of detonation or something going on with that rod and it didn't beat the crank up at all i like that all right so i'm just going to bring the next two up here to the top i thought we were only going to get one piston with carnage but apparently not we could have a lot of carnage on everything let's just hope the block is okay although i think i'm gonna get it board probably like 10 over anyway so it'd have to be a pretty deep scratch to condemn this block but not 100 sure let me know in the comments guys but is the svt lightning engine the same block as all of the other trucks that this engine came in i think they just added a forged crank to the lightning and then different pistons for compression ratio reasons maybe slightly stronger rods i'm not really sure but the block could be the same all right so this bearing stayed with the crank no biggie are we gonna have more piston carnage little guy hey i think we got a good piston good job little buddy you survived yeah a lot less wear on the skirts too look at that the coating is still intact well at least on that side yeah there's definitely a decent amount of wear here going on but uh this one survived the bad tune or bad fuel or whatever was going on with this motor good job piston and if you're ever wondering if you put the wrong rod cap on it might look something like this if you see this that's bad but if you see this where it completely disappears that's good i think we're only a rod or two away from the really bad one oh this one's rough too it's amazing how well this motor ran so i drove it i think four or five thousand miles with the semi-bed head gasket that would only show its symptoms if you got into boost it would pressurize the cooling system and blow cooling all over the place but other than that it would never overheat you could drive it from here to california no issues whatsoever this thing didn't blow any smoke it didn't use any oil and i'm sure the pistons have been bad for a really long time i mean a lot of them this is really rough around the edges it's just crazy you would never you'd never know all right let's take a look at these bearings first so this is the bearing on the side that has the really bad piston it's got some wear nothing too bad though usually when you see the bearings destroyed from detonation they have a clear shiny spot in the middle you can see the wear marks where the detonation is just making this bearing just beat itself up on the crank all right i'm going to flip the engine around for this guy i want to take the piston out and then really get a good look at the cylinder walls see if they're scraped up all right guys it's super carnage pissed in time let's get this guy out of here so bad oh okay hello well i got a piece of ring here that's nice oh man look at this this is so bad get out of my block wow look at this it looks like a smiley face hello hello governor oh this is horrible i cannot believe how well this engine ran it didn't use any oil i drove it like four or five thousand miles something like that probably with a piston like this and honestly the fact that it had a blown head gasket where i couldn't get into boost otherwise it would pressurize the cooling system probably saved everything here because i wasn't able to beat on it to kind of finish the job because this ring land is just about to snap off completely this is so bad yeah look at this just flaring up it's just been melted and disintegrating wow so yeah maybe a forged piston would have held up a little bit better but uh a forged piston won't make up for a dangerous tune this also could have been bad fuel but it was most likely really high ignition timing too high boost pressure a lot of heat and this is what happens so these have the water to air intercooler systems and the pump can fail on those as well and i'm not sure exactly how good ford's safety features in the ecu are i'm sure it dumps all the timing when it sees intake air temperatures get really high but sometimes that's too late but i just took this ring off here and uh yeah this is a really bad piston so anyway let's uh let's take a look at the most important part which is the cylinder all right here we go let's give it a little wipe and yeah you can see you can definitely see some scoring in there especially towards the bottom okay so the top isn't too bad but yeah there you go so i think that piston could have done a lot more damage than this this really isn't bad at all and it'll definitely go away once it gets bored but yeah i can definitely feel a little bit of scuff in here so what happens when you get into boost and continue to detonate when your piston already looks like this is it starts to look like this this is out of my turbo trans am we definitely had a bad tune and i went to the track when it was like a hundred degrees out 93 octane pump gas not the best tune hot day and yeah but i did drive it home with this piston with this hole i drove it a hundred miles home i just had to fill it up with about two quarts of extra oil on the way home but on the highway it was kind of funny once the torque converter locked up i mean it's still running on seven cylinders it was smooth it was smooth as glass and we were going so fast you couldn't even see any smoke coming out of the tailpipe so there were a few times where i kind of like tricked myself into thinking the engine was okay because i didn't know this had happened i knew something bad happened um and i assumed this happened but there were a few times i was just cruising and i'm like we're okay this thing's gonna be fine and then i'd come to a light and be shaken and blown smoke everywhere but anyway that wasn't the case for the lightning though go forward there we go this one's just super dirty i didn't clean this obviously but yeah pretty good shape okay got baron coming down with this one it popped off the cap look it's got a little ford stamp on there let's see these bearings did really good and just another dirty piston no damage to this one all right last one before we get the crank out yeah this one's got some damage nothing horrible but it started it started right over here oh wait a minute we got a little piece of ring too but yeah this one was starting to go starting to get a little a little scratchy here on the sides all right so overall this crank looks really good the journals don't have any excessive wear there are no scratches so i think we're good to reuse the crank and the block but i am going to separate the two we're gonna remove this crank right now send it to the machine shop to be polished and i'll try and get footage of that for you guys and we're gonna send the block out to be cleaned and also board out to fix any of the scuffing and scratches in the cylinders and then we're definitely going to paint this as well and make it look nice and pretty so at this point i'm going to remove the crank and this is a very interesting setup here on the bottom end so you have two bolts here and then you have two pins or dowels right here and then you do have your side bolts for the mains so you have one here and one on the other side so i guess you could call this a four bolt main it's kind of a hybrid because the doll pins don't offer the strength of actually having four bolts here on the bottom but they do offer some support and then you have the side bolts here so i'm not sure of the exact terminology for this main setup but i'd say it's not as strong as a real six bolt but it's also stronger than your traditional four bolt and i'm just gonna go around and do all of the side bolts first i'm gonna say that first crack very satisfying i'll go ahead and zip these out all the way and i'm going to be getting some arp hardware i think for the bottom end as well i'm definitely doing head studs but i might do some of these main bolts as well and then these guys for the most part just come right out some of them are harder than others and if these get stuck you can pry them out a little bit there's probably a special tool for these we're just gonna be real gentle there we go and just to show you guys it's very easy to move the crank around with nothing connected to it so if you ever put an engine together and it's not this easy you did something wrong all right time for our big main cap bolts i'll go ahead and just loosen these all up by hand right off the bat then we're going to remove this threaded stand off here that is where the oil pump picked up the bolts to and it's not held in very tight all right there you go all right well i was too excited to take this engine apart and i forgot to take off the plate here for the rear main no big deal we can sneak in here and get it off but after the flex plate i should have taken this guy off now let's get this rear main cover off and these are glued on so there we go the rear main seal stuck on the crank here so check it out the rear main seal kind of came apart there on us at this point we're just going to remove the remainder of these bolts and now we can go ahead and lift off the main cap there we go excellent awesome bearings these look great and you can see here that these are labeled number one and number two and so on so you can't mess this up and they also give you a little arrow here to point towards the front of the engine a little bit of wear on this guy nothing too crazy all right last main cap and we got number five coming out and this should have a three piece thrust bearing so you can see this part of the thrust bearing here and then on the other side there isn't anything it just rides right inside of this groove on the crank and then you can see here we have the other half of the thrust bearing and there's one over here two so only three pieces that's normal hey alex can you do a crank curl for me oh yeah here we go i wonder what this weighs oh it's heavy this is more than i would curl this is a lot more than i would actually curl wow this is really heavy oh yeah i don't know how many of these i can do jeez come on you can do another one we need a lightened crankshaft here we'd probably gain like 100 horsepower we got forged forearms all right forge four here we go let's see if i can do five of these things one two three and the proper form here is to just get your whole body in a big swinging motion and it's a multi-muscle group exercise yeah okay so then you can see here we have our main bearings just go ahead and pop these out these are all getting replaced anyway and you can see here the thrust washers that i was talking about or thrust bearings all right i got the tesla suspension lowering here so we can load it up and this is what happens when your pickup truck goes down you have to haul engines in in teslas it's mandatory so we got our moving blanket all right let's get any of the remaining oil there we go perfect so what do you do when your pickup truck has a bad engine and you need to haul an engine whale you use a tesla this is all we have right here this is the best vehicle in my entire fleet outside of the pickup truck to haul an engine because it's a hatch i guess we could use the gsx but that was a higher hatch that's a higher hatch yeah i just i lowered the suspensions look at this tailgate action on the tesla all right peter let's do it do you think we can lift this up this is a cast iron block here people i think we can do it i think you've been doing your uh cam curls yeah yeah i think we can try oh my god this is light this is light okay totally normal rich rebuilds eat your heart out buddy this is how you v8 swap a tesla wow that was the easiest thing ever okay we gotta get the crank seriously if you don't wanna buy dumbbells and workout equipment you could probably pick up a used crank for like 50 bucks and do a lot you could do a lot with this look at this overhead press although it's not it's a little bit heavier on the like one of your arms is going to be stronger than the other okay so this might not be 100 proper method of transporting engine components but we're going like about two blocks away luckily we found a machine shop right down the street and we're gonna bring them the main caps as well they're all labeled so i'll know where to go and uh yes excellent look at this there you have it guys my svt lightning engine is is really bad this started off just needing head gaskets and now it needs everything and we could simply rebuild it with stock parts but no we couldn't i mean who who would do that no one no one would do that i had a few people comment they're like you should uh replace the bearings and rings and stuff on this motor while you got it apart i'm like dude if i'm doing that if i'm going that far it's getting forged everything and a bigger blower and a complete exhaust system e85 multiple fuel pumps probably more intercooler cooling and uh whatever else you need in a lightning so anyway guys that'll do it for this video i hope you really enjoyed this carnage at my expense i know i did actually i did have a lot of fun here um so we're gonna send this out to the machine shop it's realistically gonna be like three or four weeks before i get it back but that'll give me time to order up our pistons and rods and figure everything else out so that when we get the block back we can just kind of reassemble it all in possibly one video so if you enjoyed this one give it a big thumbs up share the video with your friends subscribe if you're new and most importantly have an awesome day and if you have an svt lightning pick up an svt lightning shirt i'll leave a link and a coupon code down below catch you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: LegitStreetCars

Views: 380,906

Keywords: I Pushed My SVT Lightning Too Far & The Engine Has A Serious Issue But Look What I Found Inside!, SVT Ford Lightning, F150 Engine issue, broken F150 Engine, LegitStreetCars SVT Lightning, Ford F150 Issues, bad heads gaskets on triton Ford engine, Triton V8 engine, Bad head gaskets, Fixing bad head gaskets, leaking head gasket repair, Ford bad head gaskets

Id: 56-ZqD6PgIM

Length: 35min 38sec (2138 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 11 2022