Another SR20 that had a BAD day

We got a S13 in the shop a while ago that suffered from a rod knock. Naturally, most people would assume a miss-shift or something of the sort. We were slightly puzzled by what we found upon dissassembly...


As you can see in the picture, the oil pick-up (strainer) had broken off at the head! I, myself, had never encountered this problem before, so I talked to a couple of my buddies who deal only with the SR20. Apparantly, it's a pretty common problem with the red top SR20's. Probably brought on by a disgruntaled employee on the assembly line at Nissan. Whatever reason for this, the quick and easy way to fix this issue is to replace it with a newer/revised S14 oil pick-up.

Back to the engine damage. The broken pick-up led to a loss of oil pressure in the engine on the race track. This caused the spun rod bearing pictured below:


The bits of what used to be the bearings got tossed around the block and scrached up both the cylinders and pistons. To make matters worse, the extrerme heat built up in the spun #1 rod bearing actually deformed the rod itself allowing the piston to travel a little further in both directions than Nissan intended...


The silverish area is where the piston was actually making contact with the head.


And made contact with the oil squirter once.

So not a whole lot is salvageable in the bottom end, but what about the head? Well, the piston did kiss the head, so we wouldn't recommend it, but there's actually more bad news...

Although unrelated to the oil starvation issue, another reason not to use this head. This motor has had it...