Hello Mr Rod!

As you may of already seen from my Youtube video (If not you can see it below) I have extremely bad luck and ended up bending a Molnar forged rod. :S

So what happened?

Well.. everything was together and ready to rumble for some dyno action to get the engine ran in and tuned. But.. this is where the horror story happened. 😢

I wanted to check the drive train with the BMW ZF swap was working correctly during normal use rather than just on axle stands, so I proceeded to take the car up the road, about 1/4 a mile up the road I had a random puff of white smoke and it misfired, I thought this isn’t right. 🤦‍♂️

(The BMW ZF 6 Speed setup worked lovely during the short test)

Bear in mind I had already had the car fired up and idling fine on axle stands, plus had already had an oil change to just make sure we didn’t have anything odd in the oil before having it on the dyno to which all looked good.

So I proceeded to turn around and head back to check things out or so I thought.

Just as I got back to the house and took it out of gear there was a sudden horrible loud knock, I mean it was horrible.

Switched it off straight away and just put my head in my hands! 😢F**K!

Pushed the car into the drive and proceed to investigate WTF happened, pulled all the plugs and everything looked okay, I then took the inlet piping off the throttle body and saw a little bit of water residue, which was very odd.

I decided to remove the inlet manifold and low and behold the inlet manifold had roughly 1 cup full of water in it, I was thinking WTF where has this come from? Port 4 will full of water.. It wasn’t green like the coolant, the taste test confirmed it was fresh water.

Where the hell has it come from then? Took the intercooler off to find it had around 3-4 cups of water in it.. I was thinking What the F**K?! how the hell has this got in here.

The only conclusion I’ve come to is condensation over time, the ends were rammed with microfibres, plus the car was outside for a period of time and even if it rained it can’t drip / run into the intercooler inlet/outlet.

I would of never checked the intercooler in a million years for water. So all I can think is the air inside was warmer than the outside air when the temperature dropped at night and over a period of time it built up with water.

Engine had to come out! 🤦‍♂️

MANY CUPS OF COFFEE LATER

Upon strip down, it’s quite obvious water really can not be compressed and it was shocking this all happened below 3000rpm. The oil also had alot of water in it, it was very creamy :S The water would of been forced out everywhere it could go, between the rings and past the head gasket.

The rod had bent soo much that on each cylinder stroke it was kissing the side of the bore at the bottom, luckily the piston only just hangs out the bottom of the bore, so it didn’t damage the piston too much behold repair.

This was the cause of the horrible noise of the rod hitting the block. What’s the f**king chances hey?

Engine has been totally stripped, the cylinder head needed a kiss to make it 100% flat again as the cylinder pressure would of been insane, the block is fine bar the mark at the bottom of the bore which has been cleaned up and any high spots smoothed out, the piston has also been smoothed out where it got marked.

Overall I’m pretty gutted if I’m honest and if I had any idea that the intercooler had water in it, this would of never happened! I guess you live and learn. 😒

On a very positive note Joe @ Dynotronics Tuning is helping me out and sending me a replacement rods & a set of pistons! So a massive shout out to Joe for the help. 💖

Plus it gave me a chance to clean up the engine bad and give it a lick of paint. 🔥 much much nicer!

So overall it’s been a pretty horrible start to the year!

I’ll no doubt sort something out, it’s just quite a setback.