This is Why You Check Your Oil!! Avoid Catastrophic Failure!!

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:01]Want to see what happens when you run your engine out of oil and you get catastrophic engine damage and it comes to a complete stop quickly on the highway?

[00:00:09]Check out this video. Enjoy.

[00:00:13]Hey guys, how's it going today? Man, it's hot today. Boy, it's like it's like 92. Shouldn't be this hot this time of year at least. Uh but anyway, so what do I got now? I have a Ford Mustang um 0506 with a 4 liter overhead cam. Not my most favorite motor, that's for sure. Uh not an extremely reliable motor as far as I'm concerned. Well, actually, it's weird because I've seen these motors go 250,000 mi with no issues. I've seen them blow up in 100,000 miles. Uh this particular vehicle has 160 180 on it and u motor let go. I don't know what the maintenance records of or record was of this vehicle beforehand. I have no idea.

[00:00:54]But let me show you what I got. I got most of it disassembled. Uh but the motor's completely locked and it's an automatic. So I got to try to figure out how to get it to rotate. If not, I'm going to have to pull the out at the same time. Let me show you what I got. So here, here's the underside of it. I dropped the lower oil pan down. I took the steering rack out, too, because it kind of blocks those front three bolts that go right here. But if you look there, you can see the motor is ventilated right there. And there's really not much to see because that's an upper pan. And the upper pan, see those bolts right there?

[00:01:28]Those are actually main uh cap bolts. So you got to take those out there. It's a four-bolt main setup if I'm not mistaken. But you got to take those out in order to get the pan down. Even though you got the pan bolts all the way up there, you got to take those out, too, to get that down. Uh it's a weird torque spec. uh or way of torquing it, I should say. Um that goes along with this. So, I got to try to like loosen this thing up so I can get it to rotate. This motor will not rotate over at all. So, uh I tried it from up top. I'm going to I can't get a breaker bar on it right now because it's just so much junk in the way. Um I can now go through this way. Uh but anyway, let me just show you.

[00:02:07]That's the lower pan. You can see that's bearing material.

[00:02:11]Part of a connecting rod maybe. Yeah.

[00:02:14]But actually that's part of a piston.

[00:02:15]It's aluminum. It could be part of the block, too. Who know? Oh, no. It's a cast iron block. It's cast iron block.

[00:02:20]So, what I'm going to do is let me see what I can take apart there. And um see if I can't get this thing to start to rotate. What I'll do is I'm going to put a breaker bar on the crank and I'll show you that it will not turn right now. Uh cuz I'm going to start to loosen stuff up and see if I can't get it to start moving.

[00:02:37]There we go. I got a breaker bar on there. It's a little cockeyed at the moment, but let me actually let me back that out. Yeah. So, if I try to go and tighten, you can see I'm shaking the whole vehicle. It ain't moving. And if I go backwards, I can actually Oh, yeah. It breaks the bolt loose. So, this thing is locked solid.

[00:03:00]So, all right. Let me see what I can do about dropping the pan down a bit and loosening everything up.

[00:03:05]Got the pan out. And there it is. And you see there's some debris in there. uh crushed up bearings and material and stuff like that and pieces of a piston and nice enough when you come up here. I find this kind of cool. Oh, and I was wrong. Those bolts going through the pan, they just go into the cap bolts. I thought it was a fourbolt main, but it's not. Uh I don't know why I was thinking that, but whatever. Uh anyway, let's look up in there.

[00:03:32]How cool is that?

[00:03:35]Destruction. So, they ran this thing out of oil.

[00:03:39]Feel like there's pieces stuck up in there, too. And then over here, there's more destruction.

[00:03:48]So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to loosen up the cap, main cap bolts right there. And I'm going to try to let the crank, you know, ease up a little bit and maybe come down a little bit and hopefully it'll make it so I can actually rotate it. So, let me get that loosened up and see what happens.

[00:04:02]Got all the main caps off. I fig I'd show you from this side. I didn't even realize that I uh that I didn't show you from this side. That's the rod all wedged up inside there. But yeah, I pulled all the uh main caps off. So now I'm going to stick a pry bar in there and see if I can't get this thing to come down a little bit. Obviously the motor's junk, so I don't care about anything. It's just a matter of getting the torque converter bolts out if I can.

[00:04:31]If not, I'm gonna have to pull I'm gonna pull it out as an assembly or pull the training out first from underneath.

[00:04:41]All right, let me uh let me mess with this a little bit. See if I can't get something to happen and then I'll show you.

[00:04:48]All right, it's actually the next morning, so I wound up hitting that thing with an air hammer back and forth and, you know, getting into where the rod was and I was hitting the counterweights on the crankshaft one way, then the other. I eventually got it to start moving. got it start moving just back and forth. I took uh the rod off next to it, the rod cap at least. Um so I kept moving it back and forth.

[00:05:08]Eventually eventually it broke free and I was able to get that chunk of rod out and a few other pieces fell out in the process. Uh let me just show you why I did what I had to do. So now, as you see, I actually broke the timing chain in the process. I hit it with a air chisel because I was just curious if something up there might have been holding it. I just wanted to just take that out of the equation. So, as you can see, there's damage to the to the crank itself. Like that counterweight's got a pretty good hit in it. So, that tells you that that was quite a bit of force.

[00:05:37]If you look back at that opening there where the starter goes now, as I rotate the motor there, you can see that's a torque converter bolt or nut rather. And that's the whole reason for doing this cuz I can't unhook the torque converter if I can't rotate the motor. So, now at least I can get to everything I need to, you know, one to the other. But if you look up here, you'll see there it is.

[00:06:02]You see right next to it, that's the rod that I wound up having to disconnect. I had to cut one of the bolts in the process.

[00:06:10]I mean, the rest of them, I don't know what happened. I think this thing stacked the bearing is what happened.

[00:06:14]But it'll go that far and then it's jamming up on the rod right next to it.

[00:06:18]So, it's like I got to be careful when I'm doing this. So, but at least I can go back and forth and rotate it and get two torque converter nuts. So, this is what I got.

[00:06:30]That's what's left of the connecting rod.

[00:06:34]Here's part of the rod bolt that's supposed to come through a piece that's hanging down here, an ear that's hanging off.

[00:06:40]And here's what's left of the cap.

[00:06:42]Here's a cap off the one next to it.

[00:06:45]But, as you see, see how dark in color this is? I mean, it's just it's burned up. What happened more than likely was it probably spun that bearing for whatever reason.

[00:06:55]And here's what's left of the bearing.

[00:06:57]Now, it probably stacked the bearing.

[00:07:00]What is stacking the bearing mean? A bearing sits like this in its respective place. And what happens is if it gets stacked, if there gets enough wear in between, what happens is this thing will actually come free, shift, and then do this. Now, as you can see, the amount of clearance it takes up is astronomical. So, that happens. It wedges in place and you get this kind of a disaster.

[00:07:27]Yeah. Forward right there. Like I said, these motors, they're hit or miss. I mean, I've seen them go several hundred thousand miles with no issue. And other times, I just seen them do this. Well, not to this extent, but I've seen them blow up. Usually, it's cam shaft, timing chain, valve related. Uh, very rarely have I actually seen a lower end issue.

[00:07:45]At least on my end. I'm sure some of you have seen it. But I mean, that's that's catastrophic damage. That's where the piston pin goes through.

[00:07:53]Here it is. This thing was actually hanging out. It was just up there and wedged in between.

[00:08:00]So, but you can actually see if you look, look at the damage. Look how thick that metal is. And look at the damage. I mean, it it crushed it. So, this thing was at highway speed. And he said that he said he was on the highway and it just came to a stop. And I'm sure Had he lowered his radio, he would have probably heard it making noise. He had to have had a light on something. This doesn't just happen. It's very rare.

[00:08:19]It's not like it's a race car. It's a 4 L and it's got no modifications. So, turn your radio down.

[00:08:28]Listen to your car. It's telling you something.

[00:08:31]So, anyway, that's it. Um, yeah, that's it for this video. So, I'm going to get these converter nuts out and I'm going to yank this motor out. Oh, I want to show you the motor that I got. I got this from a place that we know that we deal with. Usually, we'll buy a vehicle and do it that way.

[00:08:49]But I got this motor right here from another shop that we know. Uh, this one actually has 80,000 mi or 78,000 mi, something like that. He didn't clean this. This is how it came out of the vehicle. He, excuse me, he was going to fix the vehicle for himself and decided, you know what, he had enough projects, so he'll sell us the motor. So, he gave us a good deal on the motor. I mean, that motor's clean. And you can see he disconnected it the right way. He pulled everything out. He didn't cut harnesses.

[00:09:19]He didn't cut nothing. He pulled everything out the right way. So, I like that. Um, okay. Oh, one other thing I meant to mention. This type of an intake, all vehicles nowadays use them.

[00:09:30]been, you know, with fuel injection, it's been like that for a long time.

[00:09:34]Here is the intake that I took out.

[00:09:37]You never want to reuse this type of an intake in the case of catastrophic damage like what we had with this vehicle. In the case of catastrophic damage, if it happened and stuff blew up, like the piston blew up on this one, what can happen is particles or pieces from the piston can actually get thrown up through an intake port and get lodged up inside the intake. You put this intake back on, you go down the road, all a sudden that stuff becomes free and it gets sucked back down into the new motor. You destroy the motor. I've seen it. I've seen it happen. Uh when I worked at Chrysler, I've seen it. I saw it happen on a um on a 37.

[00:10:20]Yeah, 37 V6. And I seen it on a 47.

[00:10:25]And I also saw it I saw it on a 59, which was kind of odd cuz on a 59, the 52 and 59 motors, and even the 39, at the bottom of the intake, there's actually a plate. You can unbolt the plate and you can see the whole inside of the intake. You can clean it.

[00:10:42]So why the person didn't do it like this was done at another shop and it came to us for warranty. Yeah. Like we have to we have to go through certain steps when we do things otherwise the warranty claims would get bounced. But anyway, if we did it under warranty or we sold the person the motor and we didn't do that, we didn't clean the intake or we didn't put a new intake on, we'd be responsible for it. But another shop, it's okay.

[00:11:05]They'll warranty it. That's how it works.

[00:11:08]But anyway, enough of that rant. So anyway, yeah, if you get a catastrophic um engine failure, replace the intake.

[00:11:16]Replace it. You're just asking for trouble if you don't. So, all right.

[00:11:21]Anyway, that's it. Hope you got something out of that. If you did, hit that like button. If you could, please subscribe. All right, guys. Have a great day. Keep wrenching.

[00:11:30]Even I make mistakes.

[00:11:32]This one was a pretty good one, actually. So, usually just about every single time when I'm changing a motor, when I'm using a junkyard motor, secondhand motor, whatever, I will usually change the flywheels. I'll usually change the wiring harness. I'll usually change the injectors, stuff like that to keep the original stuff back with the car. Uh, usually I'll only put the, you know, basically the long block, um, back in place, even if it came out of the same type of car.

[00:11:59]So, this Mustang, the one that I showed you with the connecting rod that was wedged up inside the motor and the motor was locked.

[00:12:07]The car is an '05. So, the motor that we got is from an '06. Thing looks identical.

[00:12:16]Everything about it, the motor is identical. So, stupid me.

[00:12:23]I just visually looked at the flex blade. Okay. Looked the same.

[00:12:30]Same dimension. I just took a tape measure, ran it across. Same dimension.

[00:12:32]Okay, it's got to be the same, right?

[00:12:37]I'm fighting with this thing. I got this thing in the engine bay and I'm fighting with I'm like, why is this not going in?

[00:12:43]Like, why is this fighting me so bad?

[00:12:45]Couldn't figure it out.

[00:12:48]Finally, when I was underneath there and I was messing with it and messing with it and messing like eventually what I did was I actually just laid the engine in the engine bay and I figured I'll fight with the and get the transmission up into where it needs to be instead of fighting the engine into the It's easier sometimes to fight the into the engine. So, that's what I started doing. And then I was like, why did the torque converter uh studs are not lining up? Let me show you. All right, so here's the engine bay. And as you see, the torque converter has studs on it. So, here is the flywheel off of that motor. This is that motor that I got from the other guy, um, the other yard, the other shop, whatever you want to call it. And so, I was like, okay, here's that flywheel.

[00:13:31]Now, I want you to look, the other flywheel is actually below it.

[00:13:36]Now, if I line up There we go. See that? Yeah. See how that bolt doesn't line up? That bolt hole, that bolt hole doesn't line up.

[00:13:47]That bolt hole doesn't line up.

[00:13:50]That bolt hole doesn't line up. Bolt holes are in a little bit further. So, I figured, all right, not a big deal. I didn't have anything hooked up. I was just, you know, trying to get it set in place. All right. So, let's pull the motor back out. All right. Yeah, I wasted an hour. Okay, whatever. It happens. Happens to the best of us.

[00:14:07]Happens to me. I am not the best of us.

[00:14:11]So, I went and I unbolted the flywheel from the other motor. And check this out.

[00:14:17]So, here we go.

[00:14:21]See that? That motor came to such an abrupt stop, it broke the flex plate.

[00:14:28]Uh, yeah, that's pretty impressive, actually, that that thing stopped that quickly and did that much damage.

[00:14:36]So, now the question is, are we going to have damage to the It's possible. Slide this down here.

[00:14:44]And check this out, too. Where are my bolts? Let me find the bolts. Hang on one second. It's not these. These are the original ones uh from that motor.

[00:14:53]But let me find the other bolts that I took out.

[00:14:57]So, here are two of the bolts. And if you look close, see the damage that occurred to them. I mean, that's that's pretty impressive that that damage actually occurred from from this This is what it's supposed to look like.

[00:15:10]And as you could see, this is off of the motor that's going in. But that's actually pretty impressive. It almost sheared them off. So now the question remains, >> okay, >> am I going to have am I going to have damage to the It's always possible. Could have pump damage, you know, something like that.

[00:15:29]But we're not going to know till we get this whole thing together. And the other thing, too, I wanted to show you is this. They use a extender for the crank basically to run the flywheel or the flex plate out away from the actual motor itself. I'm assuming that if it was a standard shift and I had a flywheel that this uh may not be there.

[00:15:50]Maybe it is there. I don't know. I haven't played around one of these enough. But this is the one from the good motor and this is the one from the bad motor.

[00:15:58]But now I mean they look okay. They look very similar. It doesn't look like anything's happened to it.

[00:16:04]I think that was from me because I uh I tapped it with a hammered it because it was actually jammed inside there. So, I'm I'm not going to reuse this. But look at the backside of that, too. See that?

[00:16:16]Compared to that, it's actually galled up. So, this thing must have like This thing was obviously at highway speed when that happened. So, who knows if it, you know, sheared and bounced a couple of times back and forth, but I mean, it's it it actually gled that metal from this spinning on there just slightly.

[00:16:40]And you can see it actually it it's broken away. It's just held in place from, you know, being sandwiched in there, but it's it's completely busted away.

[00:16:49]So, anyway, I just thought that was interesting. But yeah, if you if you look real close, you could see the position of see see where that torque converter bolt hole is inside that ring, so to speak or that landing. And if you look on that, see that's close to the ring gear where that's further away from the ring gear. So yeah, there's there's they must have a different transmission from one year to the next. They must have changed something.

[00:17:14]Yeah, but it is what it is. Luckily, the guy who we got the that um motor from, he actually has an '05 with a bad motor in it. Um he says he's in a process of pulling the motor out right now and he believes the flex plate is fine cuz the car does run. Just has a bad motor.

[00:17:31]Whatever is wrong with it, who knows?

[00:17:32]But he's in the process of pulling the motor out. So, he says, you know, we can have the flywheel. No big deal. So, hopefully by tomorrow afternoon, we'll have another flywheel. Flex plate, not flywheel.

[00:17:43]Flywheel for a standard shift. It's got the heavy mass to it. Flex plate is the tin stamped steel just like this. You know, Fords and Chevys, they use uh the ring gear on there. Um Chrysler, at least it used to use a a flex plate where an actual flywheel would bolt up to it or the torque converter had the ring gear on it. So anyway, all right. So I hope you got something out of that. If you did, hit that like button. If you could, please subscribe.

[00:18:11]All right, guys. Have a great day. Give friends.