Tim Smith
01-03-2010, 01:55 PM
In the last year or so I've been thinking that the old 2.25 was on it's way to a rebuild. I'm guessing that it has nearly 100,000 miles on the clock so this wasn't too far out of the cards.
I was getting marginal power and it was eating oil at an alarming rate. It also smoked like mad out of the valve cover cap and oil fill cap (both vented type). I threw in a new head gasket about 6 months ago which helped bring the compression back up to about 130-140# uniformly between the cylinders but the oil burning continued to get worse. Last road trip was only a few hundred miles but pushing it on the highway it drank about 6 quarts of oil. :eek: In the end, this is what I did.
Remembering my father's technique of pouring marvel mystery oil down the carb of his older cars, I took the distributor vacuum line off the distributor and dunked it into a quart of MMO. This was after the engine was well warmed up in the hopes of breaking the carbon loose from the hot engine parts. While the motor was sucking in the oil, I proceeded to rev it up quite a bit. Lots of smoke comes out the exhaust so I'm sure the cars driving by thought there was something wrong, but I kept on until the oil jar was empty.
Then I remembered an old mechanic trick of using water. Basically the same technique with a glass of tap water but whatever you do, don't just dump it down the carb or you'll probably hydraulic it with a little slip.
The results were good. A little more power and the idle was a lot smoother than before but after a highway dash, I could see that smoke was still coming out the vented caps. I figured that at this point, the top of the engine was clean but now maybe the bottom half needed help. I looked around, asked some friends and decided to drop a quart of MMO into the crank case. The theory is to run this for about 500 miles and it should clean up the bottom end, including the oil ring's which is what I was guessing the problem was.
The results were astonishing. Over this past weekend, I pulled a Sankey up to VT from my house in CT and found the truck easily able to maintain 60 - 65 on the flats. I even hit 75 once but that was down hill and I had to back off a bit due to a shimmy in the tires. My slowest speed was about 40 - 45 and that was on the hills of VT while pulling this laden Sankey trailer. I probably would have been down to less than that without the Sankey prior to the MMO. The biggest news of all, I only used about a quart of oil! Considering the age of the main seals, I think that's just about perfect.
So there it is. That's my new secret to success, reviving an old motor. Now that my 500 miles is up, I'm draining the crank case. It's time for the oil change any way so the timing is perfect.
Got any other tricks out there?
I was getting marginal power and it was eating oil at an alarming rate. It also smoked like mad out of the valve cover cap and oil fill cap (both vented type). I threw in a new head gasket about 6 months ago which helped bring the compression back up to about 130-140# uniformly between the cylinders but the oil burning continued to get worse. Last road trip was only a few hundred miles but pushing it on the highway it drank about 6 quarts of oil. :eek: In the end, this is what I did.
Remembering my father's technique of pouring marvel mystery oil down the carb of his older cars, I took the distributor vacuum line off the distributor and dunked it into a quart of MMO. This was after the engine was well warmed up in the hopes of breaking the carbon loose from the hot engine parts. While the motor was sucking in the oil, I proceeded to rev it up quite a bit. Lots of smoke comes out the exhaust so I'm sure the cars driving by thought there was something wrong, but I kept on until the oil jar was empty.
Then I remembered an old mechanic trick of using water. Basically the same technique with a glass of tap water but whatever you do, don't just dump it down the carb or you'll probably hydraulic it with a little slip.
The results were good. A little more power and the idle was a lot smoother than before but after a highway dash, I could see that smoke was still coming out the vented caps. I figured that at this point, the top of the engine was clean but now maybe the bottom half needed help. I looked around, asked some friends and decided to drop a quart of MMO into the crank case. The theory is to run this for about 500 miles and it should clean up the bottom end, including the oil ring's which is what I was guessing the problem was.
The results were astonishing. Over this past weekend, I pulled a Sankey up to VT from my house in CT and found the truck easily able to maintain 60 - 65 on the flats. I even hit 75 once but that was down hill and I had to back off a bit due to a shimmy in the tires. My slowest speed was about 40 - 45 and that was on the hills of VT while pulling this laden Sankey trailer. I probably would have been down to less than that without the Sankey prior to the MMO. The biggest news of all, I only used about a quart of oil! Considering the age of the main seals, I think that's just about perfect.
So there it is. That's my new secret to success, reviving an old motor. Now that my 500 miles is up, I'm draining the crank case. It's time for the oil change any way so the timing is perfect.
Got any other tricks out there?