Hey everyone, havnt been here in a while because my projects been on hold but now im back at it

i have an 85' z28 lb9 tpi car, its blown up, cam snapped and went threw the oil pan before i got it, anyway i have a new 87 lb9 long block (no intakes) with only 70k miles, it has some minor sludge buildup in the lifter valley

whats the best way to clean it out before putthing the LIM on and droping it in the car?

 

I would try and scrape out as much as possible with a putty knife.
Try not to drop it down into the base of the engine if it can be avoided.
Maybe finish up with a clean shop rag soaked in paint thinner or kerosene to clean up what you can't scrape out.

 

I'd drop the oil pan & timing cover to really clean it up. You don't know what the pick up looks like.

 

Yeah, at least dropping the pan would be a good idea!

 

Whenever I have to de sludge a lifter valley or head , I use the small putty knife method , and use my shop vac as I knock each chunk loose such that there is no way the chunks can fall into the lower block . In one hand the knife , and in the other the shop vac nozzle . Yea , the sound of the shop vac droning on for the duration of the work can be annoying , I guess being half deaf has it's benifits .

 

theres not really any chunks, its just a thin but goey coating all over everything, ill post a picture,

a guy i work with suggested a spray bottle with diesel fuel and some shop towels

 

and yea i wanted to drop the pan and timing cover to replace the gaskets and clean the whole exterior and paint everything nicely, i kinda have to do all that anyway since i plan on putting either the LT1 cam i have or the new comp cam i have in it before it goes in the z28


heres some quick pics

 

seems like alot for a motor with only 80k on it, altho my compression and oil pressure where extremly good, i heard it run and drove it around before i bought the motor out of the car and did a compression test before it was pulled so i know its healthy

 

I think your best bet would be to disassemble the motor to clean it. Remove the heads, oil pan, and timing cover so you can clean as much as you can. You can then replace all the gaskets, timing chain, oil pump and pick up. That way you can clean under the valve covers, push rods, lifters and spider properly. The cleaner it is, the better.

 

i planned on removing everything but the heads, as stated previously lol

im asking suggestions on how and what to clean it off with that wont hurt the motor

 

WD-40 dissolves all things petroleum and gooey.

The warmer the the material the better when doing the WD-40 method.

 

Drop the pan to clean it and make sure the oilpump pickup is still pressed in. Be a good time to weld the pickup tube to the pump housing.

I would use gas or diesel fuel and a nylon partswasher brush to clean that gunk out while the pan is off. Don't forget to clean your crank. (that just sounds dirty)

 

Wow either lots of short trips infrequent oil changes or both.

 

ok ill try diesel fuel and a a nylon brush, would using a paper towel or rags possibly hurt anything? i know thats a big no no when assembling a motor but i wasnt sure if the same rules apply to one thats already assembled


and yea iv seen a fiber from a rag destroy a crank bearing

 

believe it or not all 8 cylinder have 153-156 psi compression and the motor holds amazing oil pressure

 

No paper towels. You won't need them.

 

Pictures of sludge are OK...I wanna see the block that had the cam go through the oil pan!!!

 

Just make sure you pour oil over everything and prime the oil pump before you fire it up.
Diesel or solvents will wash the oil film off everything.

 

BTW, the 305 in my truck was much worse than that when I got it. I used the putty knife and vacuum cleaner method to get the heavy stuff out.
I switched to Rotella 5w40 synthetic oil and that has helped and really cleaned alot of the sludge. You can look in the oil fill cap and see shiny metal in most areas!

 

That's really pretty mild. It's worse under the valve covers, that being the hottest place inside the motor. There's NONE of that in the oil pan though; all those surfaces are relatively cool and the oil is whipping around in there like a dishwasher, not sitting still just barely dribbling around like on top of things; no point in messing with that, if it doesn't leak. Leave it alone.

DO pull the VCs though.

I'd scoop as much of it as is conveniently practical with a spoon, and button it back up. Run 1 quart of ATF in the oil. It'll EAT all that stuff like it was breakfast. It will suspend it in the oil, meaning you will HAVE TO change the oil & filter fairly soon; and probably a coupla more times ALOT sooner than normal. I'd use cheap oil for the duration of that. THen once it quits turning thick and black abnormally quickly, use good quality oil in it again; preferably synthetic of the normal correct viscosity (10W-30). I WOULD NOT use synthetic oil as the "cleanup" fluid fill; you'll just be throwing away $30 of oil every few hundred miles for awhile... not a real wise path. If you want to clean it up QUICK, run a quart of diesel fuel in the oil the first fill, and change it after the motor has run for about 2 hours. Afterwards, do the ATF deal.

 

Back in the late 80s I worked at a shop or two

I had 2 different cars come in where the owners didnt change often ironically they used Pennzoil dino (not sure if that had anything to do with it).

When we pulled the valve cover off you could hardly even see the rockers it was like a giant carbon cake in the shape of the valve covers, valley wasnt much different. Never seen anything like it. LOL

 

ohhh trust me there are and will be plenty of pics for you to gorge yourself on ahaaha, im in the process of still pulling it, heres a link to where you can find all those pics coming soon and the current ones, my build thread lol

https://www.thirdgen.org/forums/memb...hread-pic.html



and yea thanks for all the sugestions, im leaning towards the ATF method i just dont wana risk hurting this motor at all

 

when im putting a used motor in that i pulled the intake and valve covers on & it has very much sludge, i pull the oil pan and timing cover & scrape as much sludge out as i can. then use diesel or some other solvent on it & pull the freeze plugs.
if i don't have a pressure washer, i take it to the car wash and pressure wash it.
when i get it home, it goes back on the stand, i pull the spark plugs & blow dry everything including inside the cylinders.
spray some WD40 in all the intake & exhaust ports, crankcase, timing chain area, & rocker arms. pour some motor oil into each cylinder and turn it over a few times.
with it bottom side up on the stand, pour enough motor oil on the bottom side of the pistons to cover the pins and dump some on the cam & turn it over a few more times.
the drying & oiling is done when you get it home, not the next day.
put the already cleaned or replacement oil pump & pickup on, dump some oil into the pickup, and bolt the pan on. install the new freeze plugs.
pour some oil on the rockers & into lifter valley on the lifters.
turn it over a few more times & bolt it all back together.
before the distributor goes back in, fill the oil filter, add a quart of ATF & top off the motor oil & prime it. while priming it, turn it over a few times.
put it in, fire it up & let it idle for about 5 minutes & check the oil. if its milky, change it. if its not, run the motor for a couple of hours & check it. if its dirty, change it. even if the oil looks ok, i would still put a new oil filter on before driving it.
while it has ATF in the oil, no hard driving.

if its a roller motor like you have, i pull the lifters & leave them to soak in clean oil with the push rods soaking in solvent while im cleaning the motor.

although i have done it, im not a fan of running a motor with diesel mixed with the oil. if you do put diesel in the oil, i personally don't recommend driving it or reving it very high, 2500~3K tops.

 

ok im probably gona do the ATF routine im just so terrified of hurting the motor, this is the first time iv ever done this, before i was either using a freshly rebuilt motor or didnt worry about the sludge, but since this MIGHT be a permanent swap i want it to be done as good as can be, i dont want issues 5k down the road and have to pull it back out ya know?




and everyone here keeps using that word, "scrape it out" what are you refering to scraping out? the sludge? theres really not that much its more or less a thick goey film all over but not really enough to scrap off, more or less just a thin but goey coating that can be wiped off with a finder, inside the valve covers arent really any worse





and how do you go about priming the motor once its in the car? just remove the ecm fuse and crank it over a few times without actualy starting it?


and im only replacing the intake gaskets because it didnt come with anything tpi related *using everything from old motor) and the oil pan and timing cover only because of installing a new cam, this motor never leaked anything while it was still in the 87" iroc, its very clean outside which surprises me

 

Right: the sludge.

Your motor is METAL. That other stuff is just SLIME. It's not going to "hurt" anything, in and of itself. You can spoon the thickest of the slime off without bothering the metal at all. Likewise, the metal will not be harmed by that other being dissolved in the oil; main problem will be, the filter plugging up, and not enough oil making it through to the bearings.

No need to "prime" anything; the oil pump is submerged in oil. The act of pouring oil into the pan is entirely adequate. The only "priming" necessary (and even this isn't really "necessary", just, more like "highly desirable") is to fill the oil fiter slowly through the center hole before you put it on, until it starts to appear in the outer ring of holes.

ATF won't hurt thr motor. As said, use 1 qt of that and 4+ qts f oil, as required to fill it; and keep an eye on it, and change it AS SOON AS the oil starts getting all thick and black with all the crud dissolved in it.

I think alot of the confusion comes from, sometimes that sludge stays there for so long and gets so hot and has so little actual OIL bathing it from running the motor without any, that it turns crusty and flaky; and THAT is definitely something you don't want getting into drainback holes and oil pump screens. Yours doesn't look anywhere near that bad though, just a case of what back in the day we used to call "Quaker State"d. Not that QS is bad oil, so much as, it tended to be used by automotive illiterates who bought into the big advertising slogans, and didn't understand their cars at all, and therefore didn't take very good care of them, and they ended up like that. Most likely any brand can do pretty much the same thing except that synthetics are far less likely to.

 

ok coll thanks you kinda relieved alota stress


and TRUST ME i know exactly what your talking about with the flaky crud. when i bought the iroc i wanted to put chrome valve covers on it, well there was a **** ton of that flaky crap under the valve covers, i cleaned as much of it out as i could (still not sure what exactly it was but cleaned it out anyway) because i had never seen anything like it

well i drove the car for a year after that then sold it, i found it 2 weeks later and 138 miles away from home abandoned and blown up and half striped, i got her home and got the title for her, and i believe all that crud could have played into the destruction of the original motor, my belief is oil starvation, its the only way i can think of a cam snaping the way it did, like im guesing maybe a cab bearing seized up and it just snaped and flew apart, because under the car i found, 2 lifters, what looks like melted and twisted up bearing pieces, and a section of cam shaft lol

 

The cam broke because a rod (or more than one) hit it. Not on its own.

Pretty common way for a blow-up to run its course, actually; since in normal operation, the rods are usually less than 1/8" away from the cam to begin with.

 

WOOOWWW, ok well we will just have to wait and see as the motor comes apart lol

 

what your describing as sludge, i wouldn't really worry about.
some ATF the first couple of oil changes won't hurt, then do regular oil changes with good oil & put another 100+K on it.

i prime motors before i install them. i know lots of people who never prime, but its a personal thing for me. its nice to find the rear oil passage plugs leaking before i drop the motor in the car rather than after.

over the years i've seen a few broken cams caused by lack of oil to the bearings. you see it mainly on over head cam motors.
right now i can only think of 1 SBC that did it. along with other factors it was due to a poor build using a cam bearing that did not have a hole in it.
when the can seizes in the bearing it can twist the cam in two.
when the cam seizes in a SBC, what you normally see is either a stripped cam gear or a snapped chain, or the motor just won't turn over.

what happen with your motor is what sofa said, one or more rods turned loose & took out the cam, block & oil pan.

 

yea i wish i was there when it happened so i could know exactly what the hell he did to it, but at the time the car was 2 hours away and owned by some kid, i should have never sold it in the first place, im so glad i got her back.

and yea im gona use ATF the first few oil changes to get her all clean inside, the trans and rear are new, i got the cluster out of the car that the motor came from so now the milage is "correct" (the milage on my car has been unknown, original speedo was long gone before i got it and it had a broken 85mph in it, i put a working 85 in it, and now i have a 145 cluster with the exact milage thats on the motor, so im gona go by that milage

 

Actually, on a stroker engine you shoot for .035 clearances in that area. REAL tight.