Three day's ago, at my way home from work, with a new fan belt, my slant four did strike again.
But the love was a bit less this time. The oil pressure warning light on and the gauge to zero. Just from full pressure to nothing. I turned the ignition off immediately and stopped on the roadside. Had a look under the bonnet and there were no external leaks and there was enough oil in the sump. Called the AA and had a tow home.
Yesterday evening time for a diagnose what did happen. I brought some bearings, old pump, new pump and gaskets with me because it's my daily and it had to drive again very quickly. Only no crankshaft. In case this was not ok i would give up that evening and it would become a whole different story.
At first i took the plugs out and cranked the engine. You can crank an engine with the plugs out and having no oil pressure relatively save because there's no load on the bearings with no compression. Diagnose no oil pressure at all.
The next thing was disconnecting the oil hose from the oil cooler and cranked again. There was no oil coming out of the hose so the pressure loss was not due to a bearing or else of that kind. I took the oilfilter, a spin on one, and there was some oil flushing out the adapter when cranking but not much.
I removed the plug from the sump and let the oil out. Through the sump hole you can feel the pick up pipe with a screw driver and it was on it's place and was not loosely so i assumed it was ok.
The next thing(and last) that i thought it could be was a stuck oil pressure release valve. I took the oil pump of and there was nothing wrong with it. The spring was ok and no cracks etc.
But when taking the drive shaft out it was clearly visible what did happen. No drive at all. The tip of the shaft was rounded and not angular. It was just about 1/8 in the distributor gear. I had a shaft with me and the lenght was the same so that could not be it.
I did measure the depth of the hole in the oil pump and it was about 1/4 deeper than the one i had with me. The shaft could go too deep in the pump and was very little in the drive gear. 50k ago i did replace the oilpump by a new county one. These have lotst of endfloat and before fitting you have to grind off the housing to have the correct play but otherwise i thought they were ok and it pumped ok. But comparing it with an used original one i had with me it was not quite ok. The new one i had with me was also a county and that one had the same depth as the original so the county's are not all the same. I filled up the hole with some washers and fitted the pump again and have more shaft in the gear and cranked again.
Oil pressure. Plugs in and start the engine. Normal pressure and no alarming bearing sounds. So very lucky.
For everyone with a county oil pump, remove the distributor. Check for wear on the drive shaft and to be sure, push the shaft fully downwards into the pump and measure the depth and be sure there's enought shaft in your gear. If not, weld some metal on the shaft to make it longer. Put the welded side into the oil pump. The shaft goes approximately 1" in the pump so thats enough. This is the easiest way to have not what i did have only by taking the dizzy out for a check and/or to do a shaft modification.
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We need a "top tips" thread here. That's a good example but be careful; some shafts being sold for the Essex V6 by a certain Reliant parts specialist are suffering from the same trouble as the o/p's one did so dig a little deeper and ask for one with the Motorcraft (Uncle Henry's own brand) label on the packaging. 