Bits in oil pan when changing gasket

dwhile

Member
Hey all. First post. Some background : 2003 protege5 with near 200k miles. Two bottom end rebuilds due to negligence. Spits out oil smoke on hard corners.

Had a leaking oil pan gasket, so I pulled the pan off to replace the gasket. Inside the pan I found two small pieces of steel tubing with 90 degree bends. Looked beat to hell, like they'd really been through the ringer.

Possibly related : has top end chatter, sounds like maybe valve noise or maybe timing chain slap? Not sure if the FS DE has those issues. Will attach photo of tubing once home from work, need to change form PNG to JPEG. Any ideas?

Thanks

Daniel
 
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Checked under valve cover and doesn't look like anything from under there. Attached is the jpeg of what I'm looking at.

file-4.jpeg

Hoping to find someone who has done a bottom end rebuild as mine were performed while the car was not in my possession.
 
There is no timing chain, it's a belt motor so there's no chain slap.

Just a completely random guess, but the only tubes like that i could think of in the motor would be between oil pickup and oil pump? I've never had one of these apart so don't know for sure, but pretty much everywhere else in most engines are ports, galleys, etc. for oil passage. The only "tubes" inside a motor usually are involved with the oil pickup pre-pump.
 
only thing i can think of are the oil squirters that cool the pistons. i've read that this engine has the tendency to chop them off or something along those lines but i've never experienced it or seen an oil squirter first hand.

yeah i just googled it and found a picture of one. it's definitely that. i wouldn't really worry about it really if the car is operating fine. many people that build these engines remove them anyway.

2728a4167e524ae45b35f34885703d06.jpg


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10304: JET, OIL
Required: 4
 
Well I think we can confirm that they do get "chopped off". Thanks so much for the information, glad to hear I do not have to fear imminent explosion.
 
Good catch! I wasn't even aware mazda used them.

You should be fine without them, unless you race the thing and keep revs through the stratosphere.
 
I was curious about these oil jet things so I went out to take a picture of my parts car.



I'm curious as to how they get chopped ??

Do they fall out or does the bottom of the piston cut them off when the engine wears and it throws further.

Perhaps the brazing fails and they fall off ??

They're designed to be there so they shouldn't be in the way.
 
well he did say the engine was worked on before the car was in his possession. maybe they were installed in the way of the piston or something.
 
Folks remove them when they build an engine, I get that. Are they necessary for the motor to operate? no, probably not with normal commuter type driving. But, Mazda engineering did put them there for a reason. They didn't just put them in just to add unnecessary parts to the motor. They must have seen something during development and testing that made them decide they should use them.

But after thinking about it, if they were chopped up and "fell out" I think I would want to dig in deeper and either replace them or cap them off before driving it any more if it were my car. Oil is pressurized by the oil pump. Those have to be pressurized to spray up to the bottom of the piston from there.

So where is all the oil going that used to go to the squirters??? Think sprinkler system in your yard. IF you hit a sprinkler head with the mower, all the water sprays up from the busted head like a geyser. The rest of the sprinklers barely spray, if they spray at all. If these operate in a similar fashion, you'd be losing a lot of oil pressure to other more important parts of the motor if those are gone and the proper amount of back pressure for the system is not present.

This may be a contributing factor why the bottom end of the motor has been rebuilt twice now... and why you're getting noise in the top end if there's low oil pressure to the top of the motor and it's being deprived of oil. the head is usually the last in the line, so it will be the first spot to show signs of oil deprivation.
 
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