roasted motor? (rope, no dinner play)

[gizmo]

last night, my dad's car started knocking, loudly, whenever it was idling. i changed the oil a month ago, and nothing seemed unusual: about the average amount of oil drained out of the motor and there were no metal shavings or anything unusual in that regard. i changed the filter and refilled the oil. i brought it home, since it was only around the corner.

as an aside, the starter had been acting up. somethings she wouldn't crank over, and i had attributed that to a failing bendix in the starter. i don't know if that was the cause, but it seemed like a reasonable enough of a guess.

at first i thought that the starter pin wasn't fully retracting, and maybe the knocking was it the pin crashing against the flywheel. (car guys, at this point, it should be obvious that i'm not a car guy). but this morning, when i went to drive it to work, the banging was too loud to be something minor. i quickly popped the hood, i thought maybe a branch from the hurricane had somehow got lodged near the fan and the fan was chopping it. there was no fan, just the crank pulley oscilating into and out of the crank case on an x axis only. eek.

so now that i'm home from work, i went to warm it up to check the oil. there is none! the knocking went away, since the belt shot off that part of the pulley system.

i didn't hear anything abormal when the car was running. it sounded like it always did, up until the crazy loud knocking. however, two people i'm not exactly friendly with, pointed out the knocking 8 hours earlier. they're car guys, so maybe the noise is so minor and indisguishable, that average joes like me could never tell, but they insisted i drive on the car anyway... now i'm starting to think that they caused this... the hood latch to that car doesn't work and i'm wondering if having access to the engine (with roughly 30 minutes of time to muck with it) would be enough to cause it to fail. or am i just being too hard on people who are always consistently mean to me? does this just happen to be a "car" problem? if it could be both, is there anything i can check that would indicate foul play?

[Rope-Pusher]

hard to say from way over here if it looks like it was tampered with. Does it look like the oil went somewhere by itself? You didn't drain the engine and (over) fill the trans like my BIL did, right?

[gizmo]

there's no signs of a leak, atleast none i can see easily. i don't see any signs of oil leaking from the motor. and i'm wondering if the very gaskets that would prevent oil from being burned up by the engine are now broken as a result of running the engine without oil. but now i'm starting to wonder how hard it would've been to climb underneath the car, drain *some* (not all) oil from it, and then go about the day.

i don't know... maybe i'm being too hard on these guys. but to literally burn all the oil up, so that she's bone dry, in less than 1 month. ( maybe < 500 miles of driving ). what else would cause this? (i imagine there's a myriad of possibilites?).

[Rope-Pusher]

You should to go underneath and see if there are signs it leaked from the drain plug, the filter, or one of the other gaskets or seals. If you really can't see that it's been coming out bit by bit, I'd start thinking fowl play

[gizmo]

underneath front engine, upside down, looking backward:


other:

[theholycow]

Have you looked at this any more?

[gizmo]

i will try tonight. busy busy busy. definitely this weekend though.