Stude 289 Oiling question

anyone ever hear of a restrictor that would limit oil flow to the oil filter or the top end ? A cust of mine has wiped out the engine twice now and thinks he might have removed some sort of restrictor from the right head when he installed the oil filter ***y.

 

There is a restrictor fitting on the partial flow early blocks it is a 90degreee fitting with a small inner diameter on the oil line that feeds the filter. or possibly there is a oil galley plug that lives in the block near the distributor tha may be missing, its a main artery feed

 

YUP.
If you have a partial-flow (or byp***) oil filter it MUST have some sort of restrictor built in to the fitting or oil line to keep the oil pressure from being dumped back in to the oil return too quickly.

Any byp*** filter MUST be treated as if it was another bearing to feed. You don't want to siphon off too much oil over to it or you could starve the other bearings.

If it has an oil filter on top of the engine (all pre 1962 Stude engines that use oil filters) then you can safely block off the filter entirely to see if the oiling problem goes away. If you suddenly get a lot more oil pressure, then you need to add a restriction in the line, and then you can hook up the filter again.

All Stude V8s also had an oil pressure regulator valve in the side of the block. Sometimes (rarely) it can get stuck in a high mileage dirty engine.
You will find the valve on the side of the block, between the timing cover area and the bosses for the engine mount. It will look like a 3/4 inch (I think) bolt-head not far from the timing cover gasket area.
Under the head, after you unscrew it, will be a spring and the plunger under that. Make sure the plunger moves freely. If you see dirt or sludge inside that area, you will know the plunger could be getting stuck or might not move when it should.

If you can possibly get the plunger out of the drilled p***age, you will need to clean the tiny hole in the center of the plunger.
That tiny hole is all you have oiling the timing gears, other than the tiny drip from the cam bearing.
When that oil pressure goes up due to revving, or cold oil, the relief valve will dump some of the oil onto the gears.

Although the Stude engines can go through all sorts of unbelievable abuse without an engine failure, they do often have high oil temperatures under normal operating conditions.
Always use s good name-brand oil and not any cheap brands or house-brands. You would be shocked to find out how high the temps can get with cheap oil in the crankcase.
You can reach a bearing-melting temperature quickly if you do not use a quality oil.

 

The regulator is fine, when it went this time it wiped out the 1&2 rod journal, and the front cam bearing as well, it seemed to me as all the oil got dumped back to sump on these journals, is there a source to purchase the restricter fitting? I was also told that until meltdown, it had extreamly high oil pressure. This is the second teardown in less than 1000 miles, I wasn't involved in the first or second builds, and am flying blind with the exception of an old Moters manual that makes no mention of the restrictor.

 

Stude engines are absolutely bullet proof until someone accidently sabotages himself by overlooking something or making some ill-thought-out change to something important.

Check for things that aren't obvious ones.

First, is it highly modified? There are a lot of "experts" out there who do all sorts of bad things to these great engines because they read somewhere that it worked on a Ford.


Something stopped up?
It sure sounds like the oiling system is way out of whack.

Have you made sure the oiling holes in the bearings line up with the feeds and p***ages? Some bearings may have two holes to line up in order to p*** the oil pressure on to other bearings.

Some bearing sets will have one shell grooved and one shell smooth.
I hope you didn't accidently put two smooth bearing halves in one hole, choking off the oil p***age..... ?

Have you pulled out all the little pipe plugs from all the drilled oil p***ages and run some oil gallery brushes thru?

There are a lot of places and corners that catch crud and then get smaller and smaller.

You could be dumping too much oil from sloppy rockers.

Check the shafts for scratches and grooves. It needs a good surface or it could dump oil.

Around 1962 Stude started restricting the oil to the rockers to stop high oil consumption.

Around 62, Stude changed the rocker shaft from having a large scooped-out oiling hole where the shaft was scalloped for the head bolts, to a much smaller drilled hole to meter the oil that was coming thru the head bolt p***age.

Many people later would take the rocker shaft, braze that large supply-hole shut, then drill a small oiling hole to replace the huge hole. That cut down oil loss from the rockers.
That was basically the same as the factory cure.

Do you have trouble keeping the valve covers sealed, or trouble with exhaust smoke? You could be flooding the heads with too much oil.

One trouble I have heard BrandX racers complain about is washing out the bearings in other engines with too much oil pressure.
One common thing misinformed people used to do was to stretch the spring on the oil pressure relief valve to get more oil pressure.

Could you be quickly eroding bearings with extreme oil pressure?
That has happened before on many brands of engines.

Don't forget that there is one very important oil gallery plug inside the engine block back near the distributor. Sometimes people forget to put the small freeze-plug looking piece back in after cleaning the block.
It is very easy to miss. That could lead to dumping too much oil back to the pan and oil starvation without showing any obvious signs of trouble.
You need an almost complete teardown to find or fix that one.

Don't forget to take off the valve covers and run a large wire or something down the oil return p***ages in the heads that drain the valve cover oil puddle.
If they are plugged or restricted, you can often find that the oil covers are filled with a few quarts of oil when the engine revvs, lowering the oil level in the pan, and starving the oil pump or forcing it to pump aerated foam from the near-empty oil pan.

When you shut off the engine, the "problem" drains back to the pan and makes it hard to detect.

Check the oil drain holes.

I have heard that there were, in recent years, quite a few replacement oil pump gear sets being sold that were badly cut. Some were being sold as high output pumps.
I don't remember what sort of problems people complained about, but there were people complaining about troubles from them.

It is time to carefully and slowly examine the oil system every inch of the way.
Look for "cures" or fixes that may have had the opposite effect of what was intended.
People do that all the time. Especially the "experts".

For instance- possible problem- insufficient oiling at the "far end" away from the oil pump (Stude rear pump starved front bearings)-
restricted p***age somewhere?, or too much oil being dumped somewhere else?
- "cure"- bigger oil pump that churns the oil much hotter and thinner, making the problem worse with thinned-out overheated oil at the far away bearings...
It is easy to make a problem worse or create a new one by curing the wrong thing.
there could be a time and place for a different oiling setup, but don't just plug in any old thing and cross your fingers.

Maybe a previous owner did exactly that.
Now you have to find it and undo it.

Look for changes to the original system. Put them all back to stock. Only then can you make improvements a bit at a time and still be able to tell what is good and what is not. Beware of following anyone's formulas, they often have wrong info in them.

 

The machinist (same one who has put this engine together twice now) claims fuel wash as the culprit, he say too big of a carb on it. To me, an engine will only draw as much air/fuel as it wants, for as much fuel as it would take to wash the rings, it would have to be forced, the rings were absolutly sharp on the edges, but no ridge on the wall, the pistons were scored some as well. It sounds like he is covering his **** now and back pedeling at times and my boss buys it. Wouldn't it then washh all the bearings? I rifle brushed all of the p***eges and found no obstructions at all. The machinist is putting together the long block and up to me to do the rest. What should I look for when it gets back?

 

This isn't going to help you oiling problem, but Ruuuuuuuun, Your putting yourself right in the middle of something that is more than likely going to have a very ugly outcome.

 

http://stude.com/Ted/ website for ted harbit's" chicken hawk" drag car. at the bottom of page is e-mail for Ted, he can possibly advise you of what the cause of eng. failure...

 

Excess gasoline washing down the cylinders will make the rings and walls wear very fast.
There is no way it can hurt the bearings very quickly unless you are adding cups and pints to the oil.
If that super-severe gas washing was the case, I doubt if the engine could have kept the flooding and blubbering symptoms from being obvious to all.

Gas-washing of the cylinders can go undetected for quite some time, but not but not the severe crankcase flooding that would be required to wipe out bearings that fast.

If that did indeed get past un-observant mechanics, it would affect all bearings somewhat equally.
Since the bearings furthest from the oil pump are the ones that go bad long before the ones close to the oil pump, that should show an obvious oiling system problem even to the most dense of "mechanics".

You either have a restriction somewhere preventing enough oil going to the front (moderate possibility), or an severe internal leak (high possibility) that is dumping the oil so fast that it doesn't have any pressure or volume by the time the oil, or what's left of it, reaches the front.

 

my motor got wiped out too and I rebuilt the ting and afterwards i got no oil pressure so i changed the pump and that still didint so the trick and finally it was the crank bearings

 

DO NOT - repeat DO NOT - fire up the engine when you get it back together.

WHAT YEAR IS THE ENGINE?????

WHICH FILTER DOES IT HAVE? Down low at the rear, on the side of the engine block, or is it bolted on the engine higher up?
DOES IT HAVE HOSES? WHERE ARE THEY PLUGGED IN TO THE ENGINE?

Hopefully you can get the engine back while it is still in pieces.

Get a shop manual that shows the oil p***ages.

MAKE SURE that each and every cam bearing is installed in such a manner that NONE of the cam bearings is covering ANY of the drilled oil holes in the block. VERY IMPORTANT!
Make sure that no cam bearing has been grooved or cut by a clumsily installed camshaft. If the camshaft has "dug out" or scored any part of the babbit, then get another set of cam bearings. I sure hope that the cam bearings match the different diams of the different cam surfaces.
You don't want a grooved or bad bearing that dumps oil.
MAKE SURE YOUR MACHINIST DIDN'T SKIP A CAM BEARING!

DOUBLE CHECK AND TRIPLE CHECK THAT THE FREEZE-PLUG-LOOKING PIECE IS CORRECTLY PRESSED INTO PLACE IN THE OIL P***AGE NEAR THE REAR OF THE BLOCK. Look in the shop manual and find the oil p***age plug that is located close to the distributor area.
LOCATE THAT PLUG AND MAKE SURE IT IS THERE!
It is easily forgotten, and often forgotten.

If your main bearings have a GROOVED HALF-shell and a smooth half-shell, make certain that the grooved one is installed in the block, and the hole lines up with the oil p***age in the block. I have seen some that are fully grooved and some that were half-grooved.

Carefully put the rods together yourself, by the book. Note which side of the rod faces the camshaft. Stude had their own way to show you which side faces where in order to get the rod offset correct and not end up with a crooked bearing that could wipe itself out quickly.

READ THE MANUAL! and make sure that you are not wiping out bearings by having the rods with the rod-offsets facing the wrong way!

After you are ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN you have each and every rod facing the right way, CHECK IT AGAIN, and then get some Plastigage to check the bearing clearances yourself. Check to see that the crank rotates after EACH rod is installed.

If you don't mind getting messy, you could leave the oil pan off, and leave the engine on the engine stand.
Make sure you can rotate the engine crankshaft with the leverage of an average jack handle on the crankshaft bolts.

Each time you tighten one bearing, you DO check to see how the crank rotates, right?

You probably know the common procedure of using a 3/8 rod in a drill to prime the oil pump, right? Just cut or grind the shape of a screwdriver-bit on the end and stick it down the distributor hole into the pump.
Set the drill on reverse rotation and spin it to prime the oil pump.

Only this time leave the oil pan off, and let the oil pump pick up out of a bottle or something like that.
Have a friend hold the drill while you look for any gushers.
You should get dribbles and drips from each bearing.
If you see an obvious gusher, you have your culprit.

Did I mention that you should probably have the heads on so your buddy doesn't spray himself with the oil coming thru the head gasket p***ages? Too late? oops

I really do believe that if your oil pump is working properly, there must be a badly installed or damaged bearing, or an oil gallery plug that is missing, causing a big internal leak.

One last thing that you don't find often, but this has happened before--
IF the long long distributor shaft doesn't quite engage the oil pump correctly, you could have a good running engine that drives the distributor but doesn't quite drive the pump. I have seen people use gaskets under the distributor that reduced the engagement of the "drive tang" into the pump.
Check the depth of the shaft-engagement. NOT the old worn spots, but the NEW engagement pattern. They could be different.

I have also seen people use extra-thick oil (I use thick oil in Studes) on a really cold day, they didn't give the engine a little warmup time, and then race off with engine revving, really thick oil, and then find that the oil pump drive had snapped due to the extra-hard load, or worse yet, wallowed-out the drive tang on the pump so the pump-shaft spread out and chewed up the bore where the shaft turns.

Check to see that your oil pump turns freely before you bolt it in -place, so it doesn't have a spread or split shaft.

MAKE SURE YOUR DIUSTRIBUTOR DRIVE SHAFT IS LONG ENOUGH, AND YOU DONT HAVE A GASKET RAISING THE DIST HIGHER.

 

Alright, got the engine back in the car, everything hooked up with a plug in place of the oil elbow and ran it for a few minutes without the filter ***y. I found info stating that the hole in the restrictor should be .045 in the elbow. My question is this, can instead of restricting it there, can I put the resriction on the other side of the filter where it dumpes back to sump? That way more unfilterd oil can reach the filter before moving on, plus keeping the restiction should allow normal flow.