Yawood
New Member
- Joined
- Jun 25, 2016
- Messages
- 35
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Actually there is virtually no chance of a bearing failure causing a rod to go through the crankcase - now a bolt failure is a different matter....it's cheap and a better alternative to a hole in the crankcase.
If the bearing wears past the sacrificial material, and the noise is still ignored, then the harder bearing surface starts to wear the crank journal. This means that the crankshaft will need to be replaced or re-ground which requires removing the engine in order to remove the crankshaft -- so, do the bearings before that happens or the job becomes substantially bigger. At the extreme, if even that noise was ignored, the crankshaft may wear sufficiently to break or at least start to wobble in the main bearings thus wearing them etc etc. So, as you said, doing this fairly simple job early is very good insurance against a much bigger job later on (and once it starts to go, the bigger job is not much later).
I did my first BEBs on my sister's Morris Minor when I was 19. She had lent me the car when I was working in a country town in NSW (Oz) and boarding at a house near work. With only a basic roll of tools and a workshop manual, I replaced the BEBs only to find that it didn't fix the problem because I hadn't measured the journals and they were worn. So I removed the engine and sat it on a box in the backyard, stripped it down, removed the crankshaft, hitch-hiked to Sydney to get an exchange crankshaft, hitch-hiked back, installed it with new mains and BEBs and got the car up and running again.
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