kishy's 1985 Country Squire

[kishy]

weak spot is in the cooling system

There shouldn't be one, but obviously there could be.

Radiator was new a few years ago and fins are all straight.
Fan clutch was new before the trip and audibly works better than what was there before.
Coolant was all new when I put it on the road, and recently mostly replaced during intake gasket replacement before the trip.
Thermostat is known to work properly.
No coolant leaks since all the re-gasketing work I did before the trip, so it shouldn't have had opportunity to boil.
Water pump was new when I put the car on the road.

But without a temperature gauge, it's all guesswork, and that's definitely my failure here because I'd be able to say with better confidence what happened.

At one of the particularly hot points, my friend looked at my engine using a thermal imaging camera (he had brought it because he's a nerd, but also to monitor tire temps at different pressures) and although I couldn't tell you any numbers, everything looked to be about right e.g. thermostat housing not ludicrously hot.

[gadget73]

over-fueling can cause cylinder washdown and excessive wear. if it got hot enough to cook the rings, you absolutely would have known it even without a gauge. The volcano of Ecto Cooler coming from under the hood would have been a right solid clue.

[Kodachrome Wolf]

Starts, idles, runs, and drives just fine, and still pulls about as hard as I need it to, but this engine is tired. Probably going to throw some 15W40 at it and see if that calms down the rate it seems to be getting past the rings, but I think the clock is ticking on this one. Best reasonable approach is probably a late Explorer 5.0 but I'd rather keep things EEC-IV and from a familiarity standpoint (and pure stubbornness) probably speed-density as well (but obviously I'll take SEFI if I'm doing the work). I'm just not sure there's a combination of pieces that allows GT40 heads and the Explorer cam to work nicely with a stock lopo ECM, and I know the 'good' EEC-IV ECMs are hard to come by and pricey when they turn up.

LoPo ECU with the full SEFI Explorer setup won't work nicely, no matter how much you can try to fudge it. Dunno about trying the cam and heads with a CFI HO brain though. Wonder what the flow difference between the pre-1986 heads and Explorer units are. A CFI HO Explorer engine sounds hilarious though if it would work. I still like SEFI just for reasons though.

I think you've seen Nick's '89 Colony Park (dunno if you drove it though), that has the entire Explorer swap underhood and happened to work quite nicely with the Mark VII ECU we tossed in there. I've heard mixed results of some of the Explorer swaps running lean on speed density, but we've never noticed anything wrong with that setup and he's driven it far post swap.

[gadget73]

Mine has ported E7 heads which may flow a bit better than stock Explorer but probably not by miles. I did a dyno run on it with the Explorer cam and a Mark VII ECM and the fattest it got was 14.5:1, it was north of 16:1 for most of it and at one point hit 18:1. This is not happy territory. Some people have had it run fine, others not so much. I can only say that mine ran badly, and a stock HO mass air ECM made a world of difference.

[kishy]

Compression test and plug inspection yields what would seem to be a perfectly healthy engine. Keep in mind these plugs only have a couple thousand miles on them as they went in before the trip, but none of the ones that came out at that time were oil-fouled and those had been in there since I started driving the car. They might have even been older than that, from before me.







Poking the cylinders with a horrendous quality borescope reveals that most cylinders look pretty clean inside, but I can't detect any crosshatching and do see some straight vertical scoring, and cylinder 4 has a pretty good amount of wet gooey carbony stuff.

A leakdown test is still a good idea but this explains why it doesn't seem to be down on power...it quite simply isn't. Bad valve seals for sure, and maybe switch back to the alternating choice of diesel oil and high-mileage conventional that I used before whenever I switched this to synthetic.

And maybe throw a bunch of Seafoam in those combustion chambers.

[DerekTheGreat]

A little oil burning going on..

Seafoam won't do squat except cause a smoke show due to all the oils in it, you'd have more results putting it in the gas tank. If you want to actually clean the combustion chambers, do so with water just before you change the oil. Get the engine up to temp, trickle it in alternating between venturis. A liter should do it.

I was going to recommend a borescope. No crosshatch isn't a good sign. Edit: No crosshatch is also indicates a good candidate for Restore. Dump a can of that in there, drive for a tank of gas and then check compression again.

[jaywish]

Plug 8 could use the next higher temp range. Maybe Plug 6 but ahh probably not, well maybe. Otherwise not bad for an old boat. Great compression numbers so if it is using oil it is likely valve stem seals.

[gadget73]

Stuck oil control rings will make it burn, but not be down on compression. Being just plugged with gunk so they don't drain back would do it too.

[jaywish]

True but the plugs don't look that bad. What is engine oil consumption?

[friskyfrankie]

May want to give this stuff a shot. Better than ripping apart the engine or replacing it. I have seen great results and no- I don't have a financial interest in the company.

https://www.atschemicals.com/505-pour-ins/

[sly]

I had good luck with Restore Engine Restorer oil treatment. Had a 89 Corolla that would smoke BAD off the line but run fine otherwise. Took about a month, but it seemed to stop all the oil burning. The cylinders were rather scored on that one.

[jaywish]

I went back a short way in this thread and did not see any reference to the PCV valve and the related screen. Might want to pull that screen and replace it. Is the PCV hose really sucky?
Maybe I did not read back far enough.

[kishy]

Sort of responding to everything here:

I have now compared the labels and advertised functions of various snake oils available at retail in Canada (note some products that have been suggested do not exist here and I'm not motivated to go snake-oil-hunting in the US at this time), and selected 3 that made some mention of some combination of freeing rings, improving compression, reducing blowby, reducing oil consumption.

Those products are as follows:

• STP Oil Treatment
• Bardahl B2
• Marvel Mystery Oil

So I'll be, in some way, evaluating each of these. My mention of Seafoam was merely because I've had a gallon of it hanging around for several years therefore making it "free" (already paid for and forgotten about). If we're working on the assumption that the compression rings work quite well but the oil ring does not, then nothing poured in from the top is going to really get to the right place. Perhaps an oil additive might.

I am certain the valve seals in whichever cylinder I indicated above (probably 4 - rearmost on passenger side - the same one that started giving me problems first on the 91) are bad or questionable. However, this car does not puff blue smoke at idle, nor just off-idle, nor really ever. But, the cats are smelly, which is symptomatic of excess hydrocarbons. The engine doesn't run like it's rich, nor does CFI have a reputation for accidentally going rich (quite the opposite actually), so excess HCs are going to be oil. Whether the oil is from above or below remains to be determined.

Not really wanting to get into changing up plug heat ranges. It's going to take a stock replacement plug (and the same one across the engine) and it's going to like it. That is a level of fastidiousness I am not really interested in getting into.

Consumption:
In the weeks leading up to the NC/NJ trip, I changed the oil with full synthetic (note: not its usual diet) after completing the intake manifold re-gasketing.
I put 2360 miles on the car during the trip.
In the days following my return, I received a 'check oil' light and found (true to the light) I was down by about a quart. I added approximately 1qt of the same full synthetic.
I have driven it locally a bunch since, no math at my fingertips for that, but let's call it 500 miles. Probably less. Anyway, the light came on again the same day that the blowby would be discovered later the same evening. That day, I added another quart.

So we're at 2 quarts lost and replaced within a single change interval of less than 3000 miles. This is significantly accelerated from what it was before the trip, which was something roughly like a half to maybe about a quart over a change interval of also about 3000 miles...so we're at roughly double the consumption. Was it mostly the high rpm stuff to blame for drinking the first quart? Yeah seems likely. But what about the second that disappeared in city driving of much less distance?

Game plan is going to be tossing a snake oil at it, driving it for a bit, then changing the oil out to the car's previous diet of occasionally alternating between diesel oil and high-mileage conventional. Probably just stick with the high-mileage since it supposedly already has additives in it to try to act like the snake oils re: oil loss resistance.

Going to try to get a video of the blowby geyser of oil mist. Part of the problem is that the baffle design in the valve cover is very lacking and perhaps the amount of airflow coming out is fine, but any aerosolized oil it passes through is going right out the hole.

Non-SEFI applications do not have the PCV valve and screen at the rear of the intake. They use a more traditional arrangement with a fresh air supply into one valve cover from the air cleaner (at atmospheric pressure or very subtle vacuum but no positive pressure), and a PCV valve which inserts into the oil filler cap on the opposite valve cover. The oil filler cap contains a screen material, but vapour goes through it. The valve and oil cap are newer parts and the PCV hose has been replaced (admittedly with a coolant hose that seems unhappy about oil compatibility), but the valve is known to be receiving proper vacuum.

For the NC/NJ drive, the car was lacking the PCV screening in the oil cap. So some accelerated drinking of oil would maybe be expected, but I still don't see justification for pumping out a literal cloud from the oil cap when opened.

The valve is newer than the car but I couldn't tell you much about it. It makes an annoying buzzing sound, but so do all of the metal-bodied PCV valves I've tried in either my 84 or 85, so...shrugs.

[jaywish]

Marvel is my bet as I have seen it do its job on several occasions. Never used the other two. I believe all of them work the same way. Sort of like adding Kerosene to the oil. Which is how some old timers would clean an engine.

[gadget73]

honestly the synth oil is likely to do as well as anything else in terms of un-gunking things, but probably slower which is not necessarily a bad thing. Probably pics in here that I don't feel like looking up but was this engine a sludge ball when you opened it? If it is, anything that does a lot to start breaking that down has risk of causing issues if it starts moving around. If it was fairly clean about all thats going to happen is the varnish will break down which shouldn't do anything too serious. Maybe un-seal some minor leaks in gaskets that need replacing anyway.