Oil mods and still bearing failure LOL
 

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welp, let us know how that goes and please update us with afterthoughts along with any data you can come up with.

Some times our mods are no better than the engineers that designed the engine. In fact a lot of mods actually do more harm than good. What are you dong to the engine and what mods have you done?

I wonder if they're getting clogged with metal fragments in the oil. Try a magnetic oil drain plug ull be disgusted how much metal they pic kup

Water has different weight and viscosity and also most probably it's pumped in at different speeds/pressure then what oil will be in working engine. Not sure this test result matters much and not sure one should do changes according "observed results" of it. Unless one has clear knowledge/data how to correlate results if it had been oil, oil at specific temps, and pumped with pump at specific rpms/pressure/flow, as otherwise it doesn't differ that much from guesswork anyway.

solidsnake11: Way i see potential problem - given finite amount of oil and at specific pressure pumped, imho there is chance to mistakenly give "too much" oiling for some paths/bearings .. resulting in opposite, oil starvation, where there was sufficient in stock. I don't have any expertise, i don't have knowledge/experience/budget/means to experiment and get objective data like toyobaru engineers did (and so did probably eg. king bearing vendor), so i'd probably be much more cautious when doing mods based just on hunch / how it "seems to me" it should be better. Eg. even if enlarging some oil paths, then only relatively very slightly, and so on.

Accusump to increase oil pressure in a jam?

element tuning solved the problem, but they keep it an industry secret for them.

you can read about what problems they found here http://elementtuning.com/competition...r-wrx-fa20dit/

and they call out pressure problems

"What happens to oil pressure when you increase the oil port size? What happens to you oil volume requirements when you need to feed two journals with one main? Guess which one failed?"

there is a thread here about it too, where they talk about their problems https://www.ft86club.com/forums/showthread.php?t=63723

Element and Phil are cool and all but remember, they themselves went dry sump before ls3 swapping their car a fews years back. IIRC their other car, the WRX is running a closed deck ej.

I remember seeing how, in Phil's videos, oil pressure didn't just flatten out, but would rapidly drop off at the top. My gut said that it looked like some form of flutter taking over.

Could it not be that oil pressure is sufficient for all mains but #3 and that there is just insufficient pressure at high revs to supply all mains and that the most needy, #3, is the first to be short changed, so to speak. Each main, as I understand, creates the same resistance to flow at the bearing. The one that needs the most flow will need the most pressure to be sufficiently supplied. Considering that the engine produces much lower oil pressure measurements than most with no good reason to do so, I'm surprised you don't focus more on that element. But no doubt, reducing the resistance to flow at the bearing with the highest demand is not a bad idea either way.

I have enjoyed tracking your progress and I appreciate you sharing your research here. I look forward to hearing your results once you get the modified bearing engine back together.

Sorry to hear you had a failure @solidsnake11, I feel your pain!

Some questions:

1. What clearances are you using in the mains and rods?
2. Do you have an oil pressure gauge? How was your pressure when the failure happened?
3. Do you have pictures of the surviving rod bearings? Main bearings were untouched?
4. What are the dimensions of the oil pickup you have adapted?

I've gone through my share of King bearings on the FA20 and none of the main bearing sets had elongated holes.

The #3 main need the most oil but it also has a larger proportioning hole in the block (6.5mm = 33.2 mm2 vs 5.5mm = 23.8 mm2 on #1 and #5) so I don't think that should be the reason, unless you have modified the proportioning holes in the block?

Sounds like clutch died?

Will it go into gear with the engine off? If it's hard, or won't go in at all, when running, but fine with the engine off then you aren't getting the clutch to fully release.