Hey guys-

Well, Bobby down at S&R found out what was wrong with the motor. The head was not straight afterall. Damn half-ass machine shop up here told me it was within spec. Explains the milkshake.

Bobby did affirmatively tell me that the bearings in the motor are the WRONG bearings. He said that they were "Clevite" bearings. That they work GREAT in small block chevy's, but horrible in Honda's...

So, either Laskey Racing used the wrong bearings for the assembly, or the individual I purchased the motor from did work on it he did not tell me about. Not sure what to think...

Has anyone else used these bearings with success in an s2k application?

Dropping the s2k off for re-install this weekend. Hopefully this soap-opera will now be over!

John

 

you mean clevite bearings? those are actually very good bearings, yes mostly used in domestic motors, and is the bearing that is used in NASCAR, but in my opinion nothing beats OEM honda bearings for a honda..

 

never had prob running clevite bearings here. im running acl race bearing on my s though.... usually bearing failure is due to clearance issues or bad oiling.

 

I have Clevite 77s on a 3SGTE (MR2Turbo) that revs to 8k RPMs ... never a problem.

J

 

yeah clevites are very good... like peter said, it was poor tolerances or an oiling issue

 

Interesting. S&R is putting OEM bearings back in there.

Yeah, they are Clevite's (wasn't sure how to spell it). It most definitely was an oiling issue, as my oil light came one.

Question is why did it come on... whether it be due to lifted head mixed/thinned oil (it was NEW oil, and the coolant system was holding pressure) or because the bearings were worn and were chewing oil...

I think it was a combo of the two... Lifted head weakened / wore the bearings down a bit. When the HG was fixed, they just started chewing oil til the light came on.

There was definitely coolant mixing, but the oil was NEW and there were NO overheating issues, heater worked fine, coolant system pressurized, etc. I think it was coolant running into the crank case / other areas, as I had good compression, just leaky as hell with coolant.

John

 

make sure your motor and all the oil lines are completely clean before installing new bearings. also check if there are any score marks on the crank. if so change them

 

Peter - Thanks for the advise. The shop did note that there was copper in the oil passages throughout the block, so they went ahead and flushed everything out. Only thing remaining to be flushed is the turbo itself...

John

 

no prob john. make sure your motor is CLEAN or same thing will happen again.
peter

 

Clevites are great bearings, like everyone here already said. They work well, people just use OEM honda bearings a lot in honda race motors just because the OEMs are already so damn good, there's not much reason to use an aftermarket bearing.

Milkshake oil will kill your bearings pretty much immediately. That's probably where the problem started.