Alright guys, I was out cruising over the weekend and was doing about 40mph when I come across some rail road tracks that I always drive across in my truck but the Camaro sits a lot lower . Basically I bottomed out pretty d*** hard! Enough to scare the crap out of me. I stopped to looked things over she wasn't leaking so I moved on. Long story short, I basically drove the car 20ish miles the rest of that evening and 20ish miles the next day before noticing the car had lost all oil pressure. Sure enough as I noticed no oil pressure the car started knocking, not horribly but loud enough! I was about 10 miles from home when I noticed it started knocking but only when I would go up hills or idle at low rpms? I parked the car and haven't started it up since.
I have several friends that claim to know/think what the problem is. Several of them claim that since the oil pan isn't smashed or doesn't appear to be, it was probably the oil pickup tube or pump. They say that I need to just need to check for metal shavings and if it isn't bad to replace the pump and fix the pickup tube. And "hopefully" everything will be good.
I have other opinions from people saying that I need to probably have the bottom end rebuilt or perhaps the whole motor?

I was just curious what some experienced people would do. I don't want to toss a bunch of money at one avenue and then have to go back to the worse case scenario.

Thanks for reading the long post.

 

I would drop the pan and check. If it was off the oil pump I would replace the pump and weld the pu tube to the pump.I would drop a main cap and look at the bearings also.If everything looks ok button it up and hope for the best.

 

Did you pull the dipstick to check the oil level?

If the oil is at or above the "Add" level, the oil pump will be in the oil pool even if the pick-up has fallen off (ask me how I know. . . ).

Most likely you've wiped out the bearings and cam/lifters.

 

When I checked the oil it was around a quart low, everything looked clean.