Sounds like what happened to my friends car, he was driving his car home and it was up around 6k and when he depressed the clutch the engine speed dropped to about 5k and before he got it into the next gear pop! And died instantly...

 

maybe, but i wasn't even revving it hard. i was driving normal and it just stalled. at first, i thought i was out of gas or something. but when it started back up and was shaking like crazy, i knew something was all fudged up. ever since that day, my car has been a money pit.
i had just finished paying paying for the car, and payed off all my credit cards.....and now... 2 motors later, all my cards are nearly maxed out and i still don't have a running vehicle.

 

That's similar to what happened to the 12AT in my Cosmo. Over a drive home in heavy traffic (i.e. no opportunity to heavily load the engine) it got steadily rougher and rougher, until it struggled to get up the last hill to my house. The next morning it barely pulled it up the driveway so I turned it off and left it there. That was the last time it ran...

 

You guys are getting off-track.
Detonation is almost impossible with little or no load.
I've run up to 2000F+ EGT's by feathering the throttle on high decel - this causes the throttle transient to kick in, and if you do it right it'll injected a small amount of fuel into the engine.  If this was high load, the engine would've been DEAD.

As NZConvertible has already said, there are other ways the engine can die.  High mileage engines will have very thin top apex seal section which are susceptible to damage.  You can easily chip the "corners" of the apex seal, and the engine will run fine.  Carbon deposits can easily be the culprit on engine failure.

I can't foresee how all engine failures are caused.

If we use the square - rectangle relation...
Detonation can kill an engine.
A dead engine is not always causes by detonation.


-Ted

 

Yeah, but I remember you were having all sorts of problems with that car. Fuel pump and wiring problem.