Project240Z Post Traumatic Stress Analysis

I went out to the garage tonight with the hopes of trying to figure out what went wrong on Sunday.

I was going to take the valve cover off and see if I saw anything out of the ordinary, then pull the head if I could get to that. Before doing those two things though I figured I should drain the oil out of the motor. Much to my suprise when I drained the oil it wasn’t oil that came out first, it was coolant, then oil followed.

Once I discovered that I began to lose hope that I would be able to salvage anything in this motor. Thoughts of a cracked block filled my head. Nevertheless I proceeded forward with removing the valve cover and whatever else I could get to.

When I pulled the cover off I started looking around and immediately found something that looked out of place. Ends up I found two things out of place, two of the rocket arm guides were laying on the cylinder, with a little Matlock work I found that both the guides from the #2 cylinder were not in the correct place.

From there I didn’t get too far, I did get the timing sprocket and chain removed, and ended up getting the camshaft remove as well, but I was unable to see anything out of the ordinary. I even tried sticking a magnet into the spark plug hole on the #2 cylinder with hopes of pulling some bits of metal out of there, hoping to find something awry.

No dice, so I’ll have to wait until this weekend to get further on the investigation. I’m going to have to pull the motor out of the car in order to take the manifolds off so that I can remove the cylinder head and see what happened on Sunday.

I took the car to it’s first autocross competition and only made it 3/4 of the first run before the motor seized up. This video is of me starting to tear into the motor to find the cause.