this is what happens if

1. you don't change your oil at all

1. you then ignore the oil warning light!

I hope you have learned your lesson then :)

Who's car? I know it is not yours. I've never actually seen anything that bad, although I've heard stories about things like that.

Ed

friend of a friend.

indeed.

i've seen honda motors with bearing damage from over-tight timing belts a number of times. and distressed cams from excessive idling in city traffic. and a whole bunch of thrown rods. but this is a first for me with total oil system blockage.

on draining, the oil in the motor was like lumpy hot chocolate, only cold and without the milk. and it had crunchy chunks with stringy bits in it.

as for the cause, my money's on "unscrupulous shop ripping off lady driver" because the driveshaft and steering rack boots had been stanley-knifed too. mind you, the driver ignoring the oil warning light "for a few months" didn't help.

anyway, a new junkyard head and this motor's purring like a kitten - the bottom end, now the strainer's cleaned out, is in great shape. extraordinary given the oil starvation.

Back in the 60's that was what the top end of every Ford small 6 looked like.

Back in the 70's, I got a great deal on a Mazda Rotary. I had my pick of an RX4 with a seized motor, or an RX-2 with a motor that I could turn by hand on the fan belt with the plugs out.

It took the turner.

I disassembled it (it should come apart front to back like a stack of donuts on a stick).

I couldn't get it to come apart. The housings were free, but they weren't lifting off the "stick", the crank.

That's because the rotor bearings had seized and ripped completely free of the rotor, about 1/4" thick on the crank journal.

I can't remember the damage to the rotor housings, but the rotor would have been flopping around in there, probably not good.

I bolted it back together, and used it for the core against a Mazda rebuilt.

there are two main approaches to engineering and manufacture:

1. design something to do a certain job, then try to cheapen it up so it still works, but costs less to make.
2. start with the cheapest crap you can find, then try to figure out how to make it do a certain job.

most manufacturers use the first approach. frod use the second.

and they're quite "good" at it. they simply cut it a little too fine in that case. but hey, back in the 60's, most customers were conditioned to take the cost of maintaining unreliable detroit garbage up the ass without complaint, so it wasn't like frod had made a "mistake" relative to their financial/expectations landscape.