What's the worst blow up of an internal combustion engine you've seen?
I had a friend who was racing a DBD34 Goldie (1960's) on short circuits. At Castle Combe he lost 150 rpm off the top end in the heat but still qualified. He could detect nothing wrong in the pit, so went out in the final during which it slowly lost more revs but still finished midfield.
Taking it to bits on the kitchen table - it's OK, he had a specially shaped aluminium cover that covered the whole table!) we remained mystified until he split the crankcase to discover that each crankcase held one flywheel when the cases were pulled apart. We gazed at it in stupefaction for a good ten seconds until it came to us that the crankpin had snapped! The fracture was in a long spiral and as the flywheels couldn't escape sideways, it had stayed together. Regards,
Welded exhaust manifold on an Escort CVH engine with a turbocharger at "Man in a Skirt" engines down in Kent. Welding so crappy that when it got to a nice glowing red, it fell in half and the spinning turbo's inertia went Wheeeee!!!!!!! all around the test cell.
Aforementioned "engineers" and tales of selling dodgy crap engines to Mossad (yes, great people to piss off!) that require beer rather than internets.
Going to Glastonbury on a brand new engine build in my Lancia Monte Carlo, then finding (the hard way) that I hadn't torqued the flywheel bolts properly. It's not an easy place to hitch in or out of.
Transits, which I've had fall apart in more ways than LJK S. had Balkan Sobranies.
- the rubber cam drive gear on the V4
- terracotta crankshafts (again the V4) which had a habit of spirally snapping as you describe, but continuing to "run" so long as you kept the revs down.
- having one of those Transits break the gearbox housing in two, dumping my cogs down the M62 just short of the sliproad.
- The York diesel engine, which Ford invented as a joke to stop people saying the V4 was the worst possible engine. Assuming that the injection pump had been rebuilt in the last week, it might start. Oil pump drive gears used to break in half, with the expected results.
Knowing why the end wall of the rolling road shed at Cummins was made of plywood.
Draining the oil from an old BS lawn mower engine to see just how long it could still run for unlubricated. Damn thing was still going when we turned it off and went to bed.
A solenoid failure on a nitrous system that probably un-fuelled it and would have damaged the pistons. Except that when we took the head off, there didn't seem to be any pistons!
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