I’d previously mentioned a slight ticking, clicking sound coming from the engine. Well, in the middle of a couple of thousand mile trip she began coming apart and I had to abandon her a thousand miles from home.

Somehow, ticking-clicking turned into clacking-banging. (A tribute to how quite the cockpit is: I couldn’t hear a thing while inside). And according to the mechanic, I’d spun and ruined two bearings. So badly in fact, he said he tried, but couldn’t find the 3/16 over (!) bearings that I’d need, IF the ruined crankshaft “could” be turned. Cringe.

Anyway, a replacement 50K mile engine was located just a couple of hours away, so we took that option.. It was priced in between a rebuilt from Motorcars LTD in Houston, and an 80K engine on ebay. So, with fingers crossed, in it went. I haven't seen her since before the old engine came out, so there's been a lot of wishing, hoping and praying.

She’s running now, but I won’t be able to fly in and pick her up for another 3 weeks (I’m Jones-n bad!). All seems OK, except a P037 code (bank1, downstream O2 sensor control). The downstream sensors don’t worry me much, but I’ll do some schematic work and give him a pin-out for some diagnostics.

There is one mystery though. I had just put in a can of Restore 3K miles prior to treat an oil consumption issue (first time I’d ever used the stuff). It actually made the ticking go away as well, which did give me some peace….. for a time. Obviously, I can’t draw any conclusions about whether the Restore was involved with the bearing failures, but the coincidence is there none the less. And let’s face it – we’d only use the stuff because something was wrong with the engine to begin with. So I guess a catastrophic failure at 130K miles shouldn’t be unexpected. Except, that for all the cars I’ve taken over 200K, I’ve never had a catastrophic failure, nor had any of my friends.

BTW: someone else on the forum also put in a mid mileage 4.2 XKR engine recently. Some folks thought the $8K he paid was a bit much to pay for the job. But if you add it all up, that’s about what cost me as well. Maybe that’s just what it costs these days, if you need to have someone else do all the work.

Can’t wait to get her back. If I’m happy with the mechanic’s work, I’ll give you all his name and number. Maybe it might help some of you around Tampa and Orlando.

 

Sorry to hear about the trouble, I'm sure you will be glad to have it back in the road.

Seems like restore would not be involved unless it somehow exacerbated an oil starvation problem to those bearings. And if it did that, I'd have to expect the knock would have gotten worse immediately.

I had a Ford Duratec spin a rod bearing once. Turned out that the car had overheated and seized early in life (before I owned it) and the crank was polished rather than the engine being replaced. It slowly developed a rattle, primarily at low load which would quiet down under higher loads.

The rattle took 20k miles of my driving to show up at all and another 5k to actually blow up. This was years ago, so I'm estimating mileage but it was over the course of a couple of years of ownership. It's only by a friend have access to the Ford service records that I found out about the overheat event.

So maybe there is something in your car's past that you don't know about. I would expect these motors to go well past 130k unless there is some kind of extenuating circumstances.

 

Previous history is key knowledge. I have service history at the dealer since 1998.

I see several times, where the water pump, some hoses and thermostat and housing have been changed 6 times due to over heating.
So I would say design flaw, in my opinion.

 

Good to hear it's up and running again, please let us know how it goes when you pick it up.
I also doubt that the restore would be the cause, I've only read good things about it.
Did the shop strip the whole engine to check the crank?