Quote:
Originally Posted by Petah78
What is the pattern you are seeing? RTV or failures?
Problem is that we have not seen any UOA of the failed engines while it was still running (or again, maybe i missed this info?) thus we do not know if they were suffering from a gradual slow death. All the positive UOAs that we have seen thus far are from engines that have not failed and very well might never fail. What i am seeing is that more evidence suggests that RTV is not causing premature wear so these spun bearings is likely not related.
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As I have said many times there is more than just the obvious collected RTV at play here. Everybody is fixated on that because it is so in your face that they tend to miss the bigger picture.
The failed engines to this point have all been very low mileage and
abnormal gradual wear to the point of bearing failure just does not make sense. I bet that any analysis on those engines minutes before they failed would have shown no problem.
Bearings most often spin due to poor lubrication. There are of course other things that can come into play but lube is by far the number one cause. This is not a new or even uncommon issue. Usually means that somebody didn't watch their oil level though. When just one bearing spins and the rest are fine (as we know from a couple of examples) that means the flow was impeded to that one bearing. There have been enough examples of small pieces found in the oil filters to know that at least some made it into the system. A piece not much bigger than the head of a pin blocking a bearing oil journal is more than enough to take out that single bearing very quickly. Add the stress of performance driving to that reduced oil flow and the result is sudden and catastrophic failure.