Sr20 - Bearing Failure On The Dyno

[BHDave]

am i missing something here? how can that be correct...

an sr20 with stock turbo, no ecu, running lean as all hell and "woefully low" boost make 178 rwkw?

my rb25 with 2 cyl and half a litre more as well as a pfc only made 185rwkw

You are missing something, you missed where i said discopotato.

[Liz]

so what is it your after liz lets get too the point . you after trent too say sorry for your engine dying after he tried to fix the top end .

are you after money compensation and a apology.

are you after a new engine or a discount to help build a new one?

enough of the i thought /he said ect ect . at the end of the day just what is you want done ?

i built a speedway donk a few yrs ago with all the best bits cost sevral thousand dollers did a slow run on the dyno with a light pull to check temps oil presure ect ect and too run it in a bit . 2 nd pull under load it thru a rod a brand new alloy carrilo with a arias piston attached to it right thru the side of the block .

i wasent happy at the time it wasent the tuners fault all air ratio's was spot on /oil presurre was fine / temps all normall it was a faliure in the rod itself any comback with the rod company none at all cause the the motor was for speedway . nobody to blame just sometimes shit happens and it;s not anyones fault at all

I thought I made what I wanted to know very clear several times?

My question is answered now, which was, what is the duty of care here.. The comments in this thread re-inforced what I was thinking and cleared up a bit of the mechanical mumbo jumbo.

Bottom line is, the car should never have seen the dyno after a mechanic seeing metal shavings coming out of the engine prior and hearing the "death" rattle.

[Gts-t]

I think an owner has a duty of care as well to not bring a shitbox running a bigger turbo with a standard computer with screwed af'rs and on its last leg to a workshop to tune.

As far is i can see trent put in a power fc and made the tune safer.

If an owner cannot understand that perhaps they should have a different hobby.

Edited December 16, 2008 by Gts30t

[tacker]

I dont think there is going to be any joy granted from this thread!

Liz and engine can produce lots of different types of metal when its on its last legs. If these guys were looking for metal from your valve train it looks completely different from the flakes produced by a slip bearing under duress. If the metal particals were not slip bearing material how could they possible know that the bottom end was at the point of failure. And the difference is very easy to see, and Trent has posted that he even put a magnetic filter to try and collect the metal particals. Which would not help much with cleaning up slip bearings which are a composate of lead / copper / tin.

Not only that but my limited understanding is that a lean AFR can cause det. And they way it has been explained to me that det can lead to more pressure being placed on the piston top as it is still trying to reach its TDC and by trying to push the combustion into a smaller volume while the combustion reaction is still trying to expand. This can then create enough pressure to break through the film of oil between the big end slip bearing and the crankshaft journal. Resulting in repeated contact and in time bearing failure.

For my 2cents worth the neither Trent or yourself are gaining anything from this. I dont know either of you a bar of soap but would it make more sense to take it off a public forum and sit down face o face and discuss and come to a solution that is not going to be castigated by hundreds of punters like me who dont know the full story from either side.

Comments from us are not going to fix your engine and nor do Trents rep ( livelyhood ) any good.

[TTT]

You are missing something, you missed where i said discopotato.

I think he thought you meant Discopotato was the previous tuner.. as in the user on here discopotato.

that's what I thought you meant as well.

[swanny180]

Hey Liz,

A 'duty of care' doesn't exist - that's a legal concept that exists in certain relationships between people (eg a doctor and a patient, parent and a child, teacher and a student etc). I understand what you mean but using that terminology is not technically correct.

I'm not willing to take a side on this as I really don't completely know both sides of the story apart from what you've each said. What I will say is this:

Trent, Im assuming, is a qualified mechanic. Liz is paying him for a service.

People in the thread saying 'oh the engine was going to die anyway'? You've completely missed the point in my opinion. As a mechanic, it is Trent's role primarily to make sure that a car that he is working on is safe before he tunes it.

No, that certainly doesn't mean something can't go wrong, and certainly doesn't mean there can't be an underlying problem. The point is however that there are situations where a mechanic should identify that all is not well, and thus not touch a car if that is the case except for repairing it.

If you went to a doctor with certain symptoms and the doctor tells you that you have disease X, gives you treatment for that, and later down the track you find that it was a similar but different disease Y, would *you* want to know that the doctor had spent an appropriate amount of effort in the initial diagnosis? That they hadn't just skipped over it, prescribed some antibiotics and called it a day?

I think what Liz is getting at is that she is asking whether the symptoms *should* have alerted a qualified mechanic that something else was amiss, and thus that it wasn't safe to tune the car.

What some individuals seem to forget at times is that performance work and performance parts are not somehow exempt from the basic principles of fair trading, nor of simple good business practices. *If* there was a problem as Liz has described and Trent hasn't informed her of it like she said, then yes there is a problem in my opinion.

To say 'oh workshops are heaps busy, its difficult to find the time for them, its hard to turn away work...'? What a f**king load of rubbish. Basically every other business that provides a service needs to keep customers satisfied and happy by keeping them informed. When you are paying hundreds of dollars for a service, a two minute phonecall to inform a customer of a serious problem is absolutely to be expected. Why the hell shouldn't a paying customer be entitled to expect this?

Like I said, I'm not taking sides, I'm just trying to answer all your original question on the presumption that all of your facts are correct Liz.

Assuming what Trent said is accurate, and by most of the facts provided, it sounds like the engine *was* on its way out. I guess the question is if so many people on a forum seem to think so without even seeing the engine, surely a good mechanic could have identified this if he also physically had the engine there in front of him...

Which then begs the question why the car wasn't either returned back to you, or you weren't called and told that the top end repairs hadn't fixed the problem.

[Beer Baron]

we are flogging a dead horse here folks in the end there are few facts we need to review as I understand them.

liz's car had some problems. including at a track day dropping it's oil.

liz took the car to trent in a poor state of repair for fitment of PFC and tuning.

trent advised liz there were problems in the head, with damaged camshafts, pieces of metal floating around, clogged lifts oil squirters etc.

trent fixed the problem with new cams, oil bar, drained the oil, used a magnetic filter etc.

liz at this point knew there had been pieces of metal through her engine. everyone knows this is not a good thing and can be a symptom of bad damage, and can even be a cause of damage as those pieces of metal work their way into places they shouldn't be.

liz took the car back for tuning aware of that. but possibly not aware of any bearing problems but aware that the thing was far from perfect none the less, and that it's possible there was other, as yet, undiscovered damage.

trent received the car, checked it over, and started tuning. now from what he's said it sounds like as the problem became apparent he didn't continue pushing the car, but just cleaned up the hideously lean AFR (perhaps the car was not running the right ecu? from memory this car was the one you converted from NA auto - manual turbo? wasn't it? or was that the old one?)

once he'd cleaned up the AFR and tuned as best he could without hurting the thing further he called liz to pick it up.

NOW IN my eyes this next bit is the ONLY thing trent did wrong:

he didn't mention on the phone that he had diagnosed further problems (ie worn/damage big end bearings), and according to liz she was given the keys for the test drive also before trent mentioned anything. again, as far as I can see that's the only thing trent could have done better. other than that he did absolutely the best he could with the situation he was handed. he absolutely is not at fault for what has happened to the car.

I really think he did try to do his best for you liz. i think maybe you have a little bit of paranoia that stems from previous experience and perhaps the way he told you about the problem didn't help. but really, he hasn't done anything wrong.

[joeyjoejoejuniorshabadoo]

I think he thought you meant Discopotato was the previous tuner.. as in the user on here discopotato.

that's what I thought you meant as well.

oh... NOOOOOW i get it

thanx gtst...

[joeyjoejoejuniorshabadoo]

+1 beer barron! top post

[TTT]

oh... NOOOOOW i get it

thanx gtst...

Shut up...

[Rezlo]

I agree with Beer Baron,

Liz, unfortunatly if you had taken your car to him or not it still would have failed, on SR20's you can hardly hear when the big end's get to the point where they pull or slip, you can see a TINY drop in oil press but hardly noticable, as soon as you hear that sound its to late... Unfortunatly with the terrible lifter/rocker setup its also hard to tell the onset of a rod knock against all the noisy lifter setup common in SR20's.

I have had many customers bring S13's and S14's to me for rebuilds to hold more power, even after initial test driving them and not noticing anything out of the normal you pull that bottom end out to find nicely nashed up bearings on the verge of letting go.

Hope you come right.

[Liz]

yeah i know and I'm not arguing with you richard but I want to pick up on a few errors.. but I'm not arguing the result.. just how you got there if that makes sense? lol

we are flogging a dead horse here folks in the end there are few facts we need to review as I understand them.

liz's car had some problems. including at a track day dropping it's oil.

liz took the car to trent in a poor state of repair for fitment of PFC and tuning.

trent advised liz there were problems in the head, with damaged camshafts, pieces of metal floating around, clogged lifts oil squirters etc.

trent fixed the problem with new cams, oil bar, drained the oil, used a magnetic filter etc.

NOT THE CASE!

I was not advised of metal. As dumb as it sounds, I didn't even think of it!

No, the oil was not drained and a magnetic filter was not fitted at this stage.

liz at this point knew there had been pieces of metal through her engine. everyone knows this is not a good thing and can be a symptom of bad damage, and can even be a cause of damage as those pieces of metal work their way into places they shouldn't be.

NOT THE CASE!

I did not know there was metal through the engine UNTIL I picked up the car. If EVERYONE knows it's a symptom of bad damage, why didn't my mechanic?

liz took the car back for tuning aware of that. but possibly not aware of any bearing problems but aware that the thing was far from perfect none the less, and that it's possible there was other, as yet, undiscovered damage.

No I was not aware of that. Trent only mentioned that Metal Particles were a concern AFTER it was tuned.

trent received the car, checked it over, and started tuning. now from what he's said it sounds like as the problem became apparent he didn't continue pushing the car, but just cleaned up the hideously lean AFR (perhaps the car was not running the right ecu? from memory this car was the one you converted from NA auto - manual turbo? wasn't it? or was that the old one?)

no worries if this was the case, but I was told that the noise was there when he put it on with the stock ecu. Most people here aren't understanding that what was said earlier, isn't actually the case and that's what I've been finding frustrating.

[juggernaut1]

Liz

Not sure whether this forum is providing the assistance you are seeking as it is a case of "he said", "she said" and only you and Trent knew what was actually said (or wasn't said).

Without playing legal eagles generally the courts will seek to restore the plantiff to the position they were in before the defendants negligence be it through their action (or inaction) especially where they hold themselves out to be an expert in their field.

This means that you would have to proove that Trents alleged negligence or contributory negligence resulted in the damage to your engine. If you are successful in proving that then the Courts would generally order Trent to restore you to the position you were in prior to the alleged negligence or contributory negligence. Therefore, if you started out with an engine that was 90% worn he would only have to restore you back to that position.

Whilst its no comfort to you - you will end up spending more in legal fees than the cost of rebuilding an engine or finding a second hand stock engine. Moreover, I doubt you will find a lawyer/solicitor that will guarantee you any success on the matter. You would also more than likely need to find an expert witness (engineer etc) to support your claims in court.

Case in point - my brother had a V8 stroker motor built and it never even clocked up 100 klms before it through a rod out the block and two pistons vaporised into every orrifice within the engine and engine bay. All brand new part were returned to scrap. Whilst he suspected that the engine was built with incorrect tolerances (too tight) how was he going to prove that unless he spent the next 2 or 3 years of his life and earnings over that period finding an expert witness to convince the Court. He just put it down to experience and bought another engine from another supplier.

[joeyjoejoejuniorshabadoo]

Shut up...

[fatz]

liz can sell you a 31

they dont have bearing problems

can hook you up a cheap replacemnt motor if need be as well

[fatz]

and 31's pull the shlappers

they rock!