Why? Because if you leave water based liquid of any sort sitting in your engine, you're going to get rust. Hell, even leaving a "dry" engine sitting without any care is inviting rust or frozen seals. How bad things will be depends on how long your let your engine sit around without adding oil to the housings and spinning it by hand.

We all know this, right? Well, be sure and check out the engine on any car that you buy that has been sitting for "a while". At least make sure you can spin it if you can't do a compression test, and hope for the best after that.

Take a gander here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8117874@N07/

To be fair, this engine was removed from the '89 GTU that was likely flooded during Fran in 1996 and sat without any care whatsoever for 12 years. You could see water lines in the doorframe from where the water slowly receeded. From these, it looks like the water in the car would have made it up past the shifter.

After that, if the story I was told is true, it just sat in a field until the people I bought it from decided to pull it out. They had pulled off the steering wheel, tails and mirrors to put on their S4. I bought it just to see what was left, with an eye towards swapping the black interior into my own S4. The car must have dried out quickly, as the cloth interior doesn't have any real mold or must smell, but the engine, as you saw, is a completely different story.

 

hmm nasty..


looks a lot like an engine i tore down that had been sitting for a while with a blown coolant seal:

 

thats nasty

 

that's too bad....
must be a low millage car..

 

done!! that is one nasty engine. i would say your best bet with a flodded car if u want to use the interior would ne take it all out and wash the crap out of it because the mold might not smell but it is there and can kill you....somtimes

 

gxl90rx7, the blown coolant seal issue is exactly what I was trying to illustrate here. Thanks for posting those pictures. Any water in the engine is bad, and you've just proven that a blown coolant seal is about the same as submerging your engine in a lake if you let it sit long enough.

Thanks!