replacing rod bearing?

[buellxb12s]

At first i thought i blew the engine (3.8 in a 96) but a friend of mine swears its the rod bearing rattling. he says that he could probably replace the bearing(s) from the bottom. i hope he can because i am on a VERY limited budget and if i have to pull the motor i will have to pay someone to do it. the guy thats offering to do the work would be doing it as a favor. he mentioned something about not being able to reach the very front or the very rear one from the bottom. is this true? what am i getting myself into? he's only off on sundays so it will take him a little while to do the work if he can. i went ahead and drained the oil but afterwards started questioning the fact that it won't be touched until sunday. will leaving the oil out until the work is done, cause any damage? will anything dry up and cause worse/more problems? thanks for any info.

[NOS2006]

Re: replacing rod bearing?

In total.. we spent about $1500 give or take a few hundred to get my rod bearing problem fixed (which includes a cheap $500 to get the motor pulled/put back in because we did the actual mechanic work ourselves)...

[slow6]

Re: replacing rod bearing?

In total.. we spent about $1500 give or take a few hundred to get my rod bearing problem fixed (which includes a cheap $500 to get the motor pulled/put back in because we did the actual mechanic work ourselves)...

"a cheap $500 to get the motor pulled/put back in because we did the actual mechanic work ourselves"
wow, thats alot!!
are you saying that you all pulled/put the motor back in by yourselves?
and the $500 is the cost of a: tranny jack/engine lift/engine stand?

I'm buying all my tools to get my motor out right now, but I'm definately on a budget.
tranny jack: $83 after tax
Engine stand: $43 after tax
Engine lift/cherry picker: $120 after tax
all this stuff brand new never used.

I LOVE tools! They are my toys, cause they get the work done so I can have fun smashing in my camaro

[slow6]

Re: replacing rod bearing?

when he opens it up, its highly possible that he could find other problems with it that needs new parts. I cant wait to open mine and find out what all extra is wrong with it, when I'm JUST CHANGEING RINGS. I dont want to end up spending $1500 or more....

will leaving the oil out until the work is done, cause any damage?

good question! I always wondered that, cause I had a blown head gasket and coolant would be all inside the engine eating at my poor bearings! This is the 3rd time I've opened the valve covers and I found that something had been eating at my rocker arms. ugh

[slow6]

Re: replacing rod bearing?

Be cautious here because you are potentially about to open a pandora's box! And the real question you need to ask yourself is what is the end result that you want when you have it all put back together? Because depending on what you want as an end result will determine how you proceed here.

If you just want to get it running and don't really care about the overall quality of the engine you can have the cylinders honed (by a shop or yourself) and throw everything back together. But I've seen this done before on high mileage engines where only the rings were replaced (or even when rebuilt heads were put on) and the resulting improvement in the pressures at the top end of the engine leads to a more rapid degredation or even failure of the bottom end (crank/con rod bearings). Now I haven't seen this happen yet on a 3800 engine, but have on others.

Chances are if you send your block to the machine shop to get a cylinder hone, expect them to start finding other things worn in the engine. For example, what are you going to do if they tell you that the honing will not remove all the cylinder wall scoring without boring to the next oversize? Are you going to live with some scoring or are you going to bore oversize with new pistons etc...? You might find yourself in a rebuilding situation quicker than you think.

I think I'm just gonna put my stuff back together and make sure nothing is too badly damaged (connecting rods/bearings). I will just drop in a LS1 in the near future for performance/boost. Maybe get a daily driver for the time being from a police auction.