Ah...to early for intuitive deduction. I forgot you guys had the car now Curly. I'm sure ya'll have extras, but just in case I can send the working gauge and/or sender

This is why you should only buy parts/motors from reputable people :party:


I keed I keed.

Yeah. I'm slightly bummed. All signs point toward a stuck relief valve.

Car idled for about 10 seconds after the oil change before I noticed no pressure.
I immediately turned it off and checked the sensor.
Removed the INJ relay to see if the gauge would register anything without the engine running. No dice.
Pulled the new oil filter and it was full.
Cranked over again. No pressure.
Put a new filter on, cranked it for 6-8 seconds, pulled the filter and it was empty.
Put the INJ relay back in and fired it up for like 2 seconds and the engine was notably noisy.
Turned it off.
Check oil filter- dry.
Looked in the oil cap- nearly dry.

Now I'm going to need to have the car towed/trailered anywhere to work on it.

A mechanic can't help you, you need a voodoo witch doctor to remove the curse from that longblock.

To be fair, you have a bigger garage than I do, with less stuff in it. You just have a perfectly running Porsche in it taking up space. Get it to Jenn's garage and you can be out working on it at all hours of the night if you so wish.

I'm hoping for another clogged sandwich plate thingy.

I've got a shit load of Mormons in this state that say they can perform miracles...he can take them off our hands. Of course, we are all hoping he'll keep and/or dispose of them once used.

Also mike, Ed and I performed a front subframe swap on his MSM in 4 hours, start to finish, which included swapping out some damaged a-arms. You might consider that, as opposed to pulling the engine.

I'll always say that putting an oil pan on upside down sounds like a pain in the ass, but it's something to think about.

After the cars in the air with the front suspension out, it's 4 nuts and bolts on each side and the steering rack away from dropping out.

First before anything else, take off the alternator, there will be a small Allen head plug on the oil pump. Remove that and put lots of paper towels down all around and briefly try to crank the car. If you do not get oil coming out that hole then the oil pump is not building pressure. If oil shoots out then you know the oil pump is working.

Once you verify if the pump is working or not you can move down to tracing where the oil goes next. After the pump it should be going to the sandwich plate plate for the stock oil filter. On my engine it was the stupid cheap glowshift sandwich plate that was blocking flow. Once I removed that oil pressure was good.

Also what did you guys have to do to get the engine to start? Or did it just happen to work fine after dropping it in?

Aren't you the oil circulation expert ;)

Dropped it in and it fired up perfectly. We used a different cam sensor and vvt actuator, which were swapped out with Mike's sparkly valve cover. Could of been anything with Vlad's car, as we obviously have a different fuel system, injectors, harness, and ecu. He has the same vvt cam gear that vlad shipped with the motor though.

The port that shieund is talking about: I've used it to prime the oil pump when the oil pump did not self prime. Once the oil pump is primed, it tends to pull oil much more bettererer. I found that i didn't need to pull the alternator to get to the allen bolt, but i did need to do a bit of fancy dancing with ratchet extensions and "transmission fill" style tubes. A stuck relief valve would be a good reason for the engine to not self-prime.

You may be able to prime the oil pump and get it to pull its oil that way, which would be good enough for getting it to a garage somewhere without a tow bill.

Someone send me an old oil pump. I'm modifying that relief valve bitch to be removable from that port. Shouldn't be too hard.

You can probably get to the port without removing the alternator, I say to remove it more just to keep it from getting coated in oil.

Are you serious about this? I may have a spare oil pump that I could send out to you to play with. I will take a look for it next time I am over where I have a ton of my spare parts still.

No, I just looked at the engine I have in my garage. I was thinking the relief valve was behind the allen port, but it's not, its pointing straight down by the pick up, blonde moment.

I am thinking that if you were truly motivated, you could drill a hole in the oil pan, weld in an NPT port for a plug, and remove it when you want to mess with the valve.

I'm not sure how easy it would be to remove a cotter pin through even a 1" hole, and around the pickup tube. All that pin is there for is to hold the spring in place, so it would probably be replaced with a safety clip.

Yeah, I want to try either the 'vacuum on the turbo oil feed' method, or the 'force oil through the port on the pump' method. School kills my schedule mon-thurs and I really want to get hacking on this. I'll probably remove the alternator for ease of access.

What I don't get is that the engine was drained of oil from its initial build (Vlad) when we put it in. Then it was filled and made pressure just fine. It was the 2nd drain/fill that the OP lost its prime.

I'm doubtful that the sandwich plate (FM) is any cause- it was on the car before for years without any problems.

I would do the oil pump priming hole before you hook the vacuum up to the oil feed.

My sandwich plate worked fine for 4 or 5 months before it got clogged and stopped the oil flow. It was working fine on Sunday, then later that week when I went to drive the car to work it was clogged. As far as I could tell there was no rhyme or reason to the cause.

What was it clogged with? Pics? I read your thread, but saw no conclusion to the sandwich plate issue.

Honestly never found out. Gave it to my machine shop to look at and then never followed up. When I am back at the shop sometime within the next week I will check and see if they still have it laying around anywhere.

You could also try some compressed air to help force anything through a choke point. Obviously use a reasonable amount of pressure.

I used the vacuum method, a brake bleeding pump, and shot a little compressed air through the turbo oil feed and the pressure sender 1/8NPT while it was off. Seemed to start up a lot more solidly after I went all out.

This was when I was going through my "do I have oil pressure or a shitty gauge" saga.

So if the relief valve is stuck, what's the fix? Removing it and cleaning/smoothing the plunger and hole? Replace pump with a new one?

I'd get a BE billet pump if you're gonna replace it.

But I still think its clogged, cause I specifically took a LONG time cleaning and polishing that part when I took apart the stocker. I read all the horror stories about stuck valve