I have been dying to ask, when you loose an engine, what are you doing at the time? Do they poop out mostly under boost? Do you ever loose one under normal driving? Do you see a dramatic reduction in engine life with higher boost? What mileage would you pull down a running engine at to do a freshen up?

I think I have about 60K on a Mazda reman. Engine seems to be healthy, runs and starts well, but I cannot resist the boost temptation much. Is it time to plan for gaskets?

 

http://mahjik.homestead.com/files/FD...0040911_04.jpg

 

a bird pooped on mine and it blew.

 

I was hauling *** in second gear at 14 psi. It wasn't a lean condition that blew it, it was just an old tired motor that gave up. The rear rotor went. The front was fine. I found parts of the rear apex seals in the exhaust manifold...

 

I was making a right turn with only about 5 psi of boost when mine blew... It wasn't a "bad" one.. it would still start and idle, but a bit rough. Once you were moving, you couldn't even tell. I rebuilt it anyhow and found one cracked seal and one with a chip off the corner.

 

Both times under about 15 psi of boost. One on a really cold day, and one on a really hot day.

Adam

 

Accelerated from a traffic light, shifted from 2nd to 3rd @5k and pwooom! big hicup and a big cloud of black smoke...

 

Racing a 911. I still managed to beat him and get home. It was kind of bad but it still started, just had a rough idle. The engine had a good 80k miles on it at the time.

 

2 times. . . NICE!!. . i blew mine after i downshifted to 4th on the highway and starting hauling ***. then my passenger side aluminum floor panel started falling off .

I had about 80k on the clock

 

Sold a PFS Pink9 to friend......after three days of good use, friend demo's a hard acceleration from a stop sign; brrraaaaaaaapp-shift-brrraaaaaaapp-shift-uuuuuuuuuuuuuggggghhhhhh. Boost spike.

After install and dyno-tune of RP streetport w/ Pink9, the car was evil

 

Mine started to go at about 45k on reman, started to run and idle pretty rough. still started and ran but I knew that the motor had taken a dump. So I turned up the boost and finished her off. I was pretty ignorant to keep driving it, and got lucky the internals were fine. Oh well, a new motor, large street port, single turbo conversion, life is good!

 

Normal Driving boosting 8psi and dropped 4 coolant seals 2 in the front rotor 2 in the rear rotor. She started but over heated and smoked like hell.

 

My rotary died on the California smog dyno. The smog tech was under the hood when the water seals gave out and started spewing coolant. I should sue the city.

 

Both within the same year

 

Stop talking about it. You're scaring me.

 

Serious ^ i'm a little up set i clicked on this and started reading.

 

The purpose for asking was this: Should I expect trouble from normal driving? I can accept a ka-boom when I am thrashing her. That's racing.

What this tells me is that it is not as bad as it seems. by in large most people are pushing the limit someway when it happens (but not always). That's ok....to be expected with something like this....

I really feel for the guy that lost the seal on the dyno. I work on very big engines (3500HP+). One day I came to work to find a rod laying on the dyno floor next to the engine. It was just laying there all by itself with a little bitty hole in the block. The poor engineer had to contend with shelling a million dollar prototype. Root cause? Wrong injector by mistake...caused the rod to fatigue.

 

I was driving normal on a regular sunny day. It just went. Scary how these engines go just like that

 

holy ****. Did you like copy my car? I was racing a 911. Dropped it to 3rd, hit like 4700 rpm, was rearing up real strong, and just heard, tick tick boom, front end dropped to the ground. Drove another 5 miles, stopped, talking to the guy i raced. Called my dad "umm dad i think i did something to car" "ok bring it home" drove 20 miles home, parked it, died 30 seconds later. terrible idle, sounded like it was gonna died every second. Then i found, out of oil, and the guy before me, ran a MP without an ecu. so it had spikes.