Posted 24 May 2012 - 10:35 AM
Well, in 1988 or thereabouts, there was no Mini forum to inform people of the hazards of that particular oil additive!
But the failed crank, which knocked horribly, was the beginning of a very sad tale. I hired a Fiesta for two weeks, went to some place in Putney for a genuine Gold Seal engine (about £400) with warranty, and fitted it myself as the warranty allowed. Oh, and I bamboozled the proprietor of the mini spares place in Putney by apparently measuring the primary gear thrust washer between finger and thumb. He brought out a box of assorted thrust washers, and was going to run through them all by trial and error, but I measured the clearance of the old one by a feeler gauge, decided the new one needed to be 4 thou thicker, picked up a likely looking one and held it edge to edge against the old one, between finger and thumb. You can feel a step of 4 thou quite distinclly if your fingertips are in good condition. True, you can't tell if it is 4 thou, but with experience you know that it is greater than 2 thou and less than about 8 thou. I was just trying to weed out those that were nowhere near the right size, but by some fluke, it was spot on. Ran it in carefully, retorqued the head properly, etc, and then changed the oil, as you would in a new car. So far, so good.
Then with about 1500 miles on the new engine, after a long hard run, it siezed and had to be towed to the Rover dealer. There was no temperature gauge, and a core plug had popped completely out. The engine was unbelievably hot, and ruined. No quibble about the warranty, the engine was duly replaced by another Gold Seal unit, but my pocket was about £50 lighter for gaskets, fresh oil, and anything else the garage could invent.
Less than 1000 miles later, it stopped suddenly. A core plug had come out, this time drowning the distributor, which of course saved the engine from damage. This time I spent about 5p at Halfords for a new core plug and fitted it myself, to avoid having to fork out more cash to the garage for another warranty job. Can't remember if I spent a bit more and changed all the core plugs or not. I also fitted a panel with temperature, oil pressure and voltmeter gauges, to try to prevent a recurrence. The engine was fine after that.
But two blown core plugs in two successibe genuine gold seal engines? I don't think that QA at Rover had much of a clue about anything if they were sending them out with core plugs not fitted properly.