Fix it or Scrap it - Cast your vote now.....

scrap, it will bring in 100 pounds as light iron

Accompanied by the sound of a chisel on slate Steve Walker, managed to produce the following words of wisdom

That's all I needed to read. Scrap it.

Scrap. Ten yr old Rover...maybe tip of iceberg...expensive spares....etc.

I have a v nice 92 525 beemer, needs about 100 quid worth of parts and then labour...and MOT

i cant get bugger all for it, as on ebay you get one already on the for a couple of hundred...

It's a rover scrap it. Nothing but trouble.

The oil pressure warning light didn't come on?

FWIW in general, it doesn't take too much to drop the oil pan and remove and inspect the big ends. If the crank and conrods are ok then a new set of same size bearings might do you for a while. ...but can you be bothered?

Apparently it started flickering, then came on completely. At that point she looked for a space to pull over and did so within about 10 secs. Pity she didn't cut the engine and coast it into the kerb, but there y'go.... :o(

Thanks adder - frankly, I'm not remotely prepared to do stuff like that under a jacked car. I'm too old now, my back is fragile and my spare time is too precious. I'd happily take the head off, or deal with brakes etc, but the thought of hour after hour under that filthy, rusty engine.... nah!

The panel have spoken - unless I can get a fix for a lot less than expected, it's off to the breakers.....

Thanks all!

Well it's worth ringing the local scrappys to see how much you can get an engine for.

What I mean is, and as you say, it's probably more hassle than it's worth.

Thus spake Steve Walker ( snipped-for-privacy@beeb.net) unto the assembled multitudes:

That surprises me. An engine should run for some time without harm if it loses its oil, before damage occurs. I certainly wouldn't have thought 10 seconds would have made any difference.

I remember reading an article in Car Mechanics where they emptied all the oil out of an engine and then ran the car round a track. It lasted for several miles before the engine gave out. But this was quite a few years ago (late 70s or early 80s); maybe modern cars have lower tolerances.

That was till it stopped, not til it had suffered major damage.

Yeah, but this was a 100,000 miler - bearing & turbo etc were probably already 70-80% worn out, so it only needed a nudge to finish it off.

Actually we don't know how long the oil had been draining. The duration of the light blinking is not an accurate indicator: it starts blinking when a preset value is reached but leakage may have started minutes before.

Interestingly, a new type of oil *temperature* monitoring system - Rate Of Change (ROC) temperature sensor - has been introduced. The idea is to track how fast the temperature is rising; when a preset rate is exceeded, an alarm will be raised. Continuously 3 sequential temperatures are taken,

30 seconds apart. What interests us here is the 30 seconds. Since oil takes some time to empty to a dangerous level - it takes minutes to drain the oil sump in an oil change - it suggests 10 seconds of pressure indicator light blinking is not likely to cause catastrophic damage to the engine, *if* blinking starts very quickly soon after a leak occurs.

I accept a worn out engine complicates matter!