With gruesome pictures!

Forget about “Hello Kitty” costumes and Harvest Festivals; the only thing that makes Halloween worthwhile is fear. Since nothing is scarier than catastrophic damage to your expensive vehicles, that’s where we’ll take you this month. This horrifying TRUE story didn’t happen to a friend-of-a-friend, it actually happened to one of our clients. We first told you about it in 2011, but it still sends chills down our spines today. So cue the scary music, turn off the lights, and settle in. It’s time for REAL LIFE AUTOMOTIVE HORROR STORIES…

(January, 2011) Usually, when we do a story about some critical system in your vehicle we talk in generalities because we want you to get an overall understanding of whatever we’re talking about, but sometimes a real-life example tells the story better than anything else can. This is one of those times, but beware… it’s not for the faint of heart!

Recently, a client (we’ll call him/her “Mr. X”) brought their vehicle in with a check-engine light, power loss, rough idle, and a severe oil leak. The vehicle had been running fine until all of a sudden the problems hit. We put the car on the rack and quickly diagnosed a leak in the valve cover gasket (the gasket that makes a complete seal between the cylinder head and the cover on top of it.) A little investigation showed that Mr. X was overdue for an oil change… 20,000 miles overdue!

Clean oil is essential to the operation of your vehicle. Oil works by building a slippery film around all the moving parts of your engine to reduce friction during operation. Dirty oil carries abrasive particulates through your motor, grinding against the parts like sandpaper and causing needless engine wear. Even dirty oil is better than no oil at all, because without oil the parts themselves contact and can cause catastrophic engine failure in seconds. When engine oil remains in service beyond its recommended lifetime (about 3000-4000 miles for conventional oil, and about 6000-8000 miles for synthetic), it begins to burn off and leave hard sludgy deposits similar to the burnt mess found on the bottom of a neglected oven. The best solution to this problem is to change your engine oil regularly.

But back to our client… Luckily, Mr. X brought the car in immediately before more major damage was done. We were able to clean the sludge off of the internal components, but not before we took the horrific pictures below.

There are several take-away messages from Mr. X’s experience, but perhaps the most important is the ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL IMPORTANCE OF OIL CHANGES. Another lesson is that Mr. X had been driving happily with no problems until the sudden gasket failure. This is a common occurrence in modern vehicles, where the computer systems can mask problems until you’re left on the side of the road. Don’t assume that if your vehicle is showing no problems then there’s nothing wrong! One final lesson is that this problem was Mr. X’s first experience with Tom Dwyer Automotive. Had he been a regular client already, our proactive maintenance and inspection programs would have caught the fact that he was behind on his oil changes long before problems actually appeared. This is exactly the type of problem we work so hard to avoid, and now that Mr. X is planning to come back to us he can drive confidently knowing that we’ll be watching out for him.

And now, as we promised, graphic and horrifying pictures of what can happen to your engine if you don’t stay up on oil changes. Again, beware… these pictures are NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART!

Before

Over the miles, the engine oil had broken down into its basic parts and formed a tar-like black sludge that coated the entire engine. The first two pictures show the top of the engine with the valve cover removed. The sludge had packed the engine such that the engine parts and oil had to fight through the goo in order to move. The second picture shows just how thick that goo was… that screwdriver is stuck into the sludge about 1½ inches!

After

It took a while, but we were finally able to clean everything out. In the third picture you can see the moving parts that were covered by the burnt oil. The last picture shows that same chamber that had the screwdriver stuck into it, now clean as a whistle. Once again, this is an engine that’s ready to run cleanly and efficiently.