When I first heard the sound the engine was making I knew something bad had happen. I was hoping it was an injector causing the sound. Found brand new ...
Was there any reason for the bearing failure identified? Doing the bottom
end the way they have makes it more torsionally rigid, it also means you
don't need a brace plate on the bottom of the block. I think VM Motori are
basically the Italian version of Kubota, they make lots of different
industrial and automotive engines, air and water cooled. Nice to see
someone repair stuff for a change, very informative. Cheers, Ray
+whorayful Yep this had torque to yield head bolts, Other thing I dont like about it, it has a timming blet . Id rather a chain or better yet gears. My Cummins engine useds gears. water pump is a pain in the butt to get to. In side the timing cover. most cars Ive seen its behide the fan cluch. Also most of the parts had to be inported from Italy. There was so few made in th usa parts are hard to find. Dealer and a site call ID parts is where I got parts from. No one locally had parts for it. My brother always gets a kick out of when he pulls up to a gas pump and people say your putting diesal in your tank. Hes even had a neighbor flag him down and said your car is knocking lol. When the engine is cold it rattles pretty good.
+Sazabizc Not many modern engines are easy to work on, so much stuff is single use, like torque stretch bolts, once tightened you have to throw them away and buy new ones, if you have to pay someone else to do all the work it soon gets too expensive. Oil pressure lights are a waste of time as you found out, they have to be set so low pressure so they don't come on at hot idle that the engine can chewing itself out at high revs with no warning light. Congrats on getting it fixed and running again, not too many people today can say they did that. Cheers Ray
+whorayful Lack Of oil . My best guess about a year before the rod bearing took a dump, the turbo seal failed. And it lost all but 2 quarts of oil. Proboby damaged the bearing then, but took it a while to start failing. Bad thing about that car theres no oil pressure gauge just a low oil light. And it never came on ! Only Reson We knew somthing was wrong, the turno sounded like it was eating Metal. It was,THe shaft had complety broke in half and oil was going in the exhast and intake. Ive read on Line this engine was very popular in Taxis and Delivery vans in europe. Its a neat liilte engine but man its not User-Friendly to work on. Very labor intensive. Gets good MPG how ever .