Had the oil pan off and took some pictures of this wear. Have another post I’m putting up, but taking 20w50 oil and heavy duty lucas oil stabilizer to keep oil pressure up at hot idle, and, probably separate problem, huge misfiring cylinder at idle. But what is this wear from?


Notice the lighter brown colors, left to right. Left is slightly shaved off metal.

The edge is ground down and jagged. What is this rubbing against?

This mark is inside the oil pan. Could this rubbing be from those parts in the engine? I’m so ignorant I don’t even know what those parts are called.

 

that all just looks like marks made during production of the engine parts such as removing casting "flash"ETC.

 

Those are the marks of a grinding wheel on a hand held power tool, probably wielded by a drunken British fellow producing **** LR V8 motors that will later all blow up in our vehicles. Bless him.

 

The more concerning issue is that you're running 20W50 Oil to maintain oil pressure. I don't suggest you go any thicker even if your oil pressure is going down with time. Replace the pump or do what is needed to fix the problem. Thicker does not mean more protection, too thick and it fails to make it to the areas it should and delivers not enough protection. You're running 50 weight oil and then adding lucas products that essentially raise the viscosity through the roof. This can lead to disaster at some point and on this motor I don't know when that point is but I don't suggest you test it. You're in the South so you're fine but just a fair warning about going thicker or adding magical products like Lucas etc.

 

So all that wear is "normal"? That's encouraging! I got a good visual of that drunken British fellow, love it.

05TurboS2K, yeah, I'm aware it's not ideal. It's more of a scheme of buying time until I can save up for a full engine swap, and I might as well drive it to death in the meantime, doing my best to mitigate symptoms. I don't have time anymore with two young kids and my work to do extensive repairs on my Disco, though I've put several hundreds hours into it over the last few years when I wasn't so strapped. Labor costs have to factor into any large repairs I do now. Once you add labor costs in, anything related to bearing work or anything deep in the engine makes me hesitant to keep this old engine going, and I'd rather let it sit (never sell it), drop $2k on a beater car to drive for a couple years while I save u,p and then do a full engine swap. I've been eyeing JE Robison, figure I'll just ship it to him when it dies and have him do a proper swap so I've got my bases covered, since he seems to be the most knowledgeable Land Rover tech in the States. But... $15,000 will take a while to save.

Am I absolutely insane?

Disco 2004 SE with 145,000 miles and loads of maintenance over the years. Pretty much hit every high mileage maintenance item on the list after 100,000 miles, including timing chains and sprockets. Did oil pump at 109,000 miles. I keep a maintenance log on my phone and it's dozens of pages long.

 

Yeah, I expect his name is Nigel Rovermaker, usually by 11am, he's looking to buy a pint from the pub Olde Bingley Inn. What an asshat he is! lol

You'll get a little more time I figure but often I wonder, when oil pressure gets low, is it actually worse to run thicker oil because, while the gauge sees more pressure due to the oil being forced through it, the actual amount of engine oil exchanged is even less. Something to ponder I suppose. Our buddy Nigel probably has a lot of time to think about these things.

I'm in my 30's with a family, I know just what you mean. I bought the expensive LS swap kit a couple days ago because I can't afford to continue to dump time and money into the 4.6 honestly. If I'm going to keep it, it must be dependable at this point. Luckily I've a beater to get us by in it's place for a bit but the wife wants her Discovery back badly.

$15k?! I'll have to give your insanity plea the nod. Takes one to know one.

You could drop a highly dependable Chevy LS motor in from a Silverado 1500 truck for about $4500 honestly..... it'd be better in every single way and run regular fuel instead of premium, more power, more reliability and be MUCH cheaper to work on with plentiful parts. If you sourced all your stuff in advance, the swap could be done just a few days I think. I'm going to spend probably just over $5000 but that's because I want an aluminum block to keep the weight down and I'm going with a very low mileage motor. I intend to do nearly no maintence, drive that motor 200k more miles with no work at all on it, when it finally ****s the bed, I'll yank it out in one day and replace it the following day and drive the next one for another 10 years or more. Hell, a LM7 motor can be had today for $200 bucks at a junk yard, why bother doing any motor work when you can just swap a new motor in. I'll do spark plugs and basic crap but that's about it.

-Greg

 

Probably the bearings wearing that is dropping the oil pressure - how many miles, have long have you owned it, have you checked to make sure you don't have a walked cam bearing? SInce you have the pan off pop one of the rod caps off and lets see the bearing wear. pattern.

 

^ Good advice.

 

05TurboS2K — Good luck with the LS swap! I’ve briefly considered doing junk yard swaps but I’d rather stick with an overhauled 4.6 from JE Robison that has all the original issues remedied and basically just go “Brand new engine,” plus keeping in the realm of original equipment. Original massively modified equipment hah.

I’ve been watching engine explanation videos today and finally got my answer on those engine parts: Crankshaft counterweights are what I was seeing that wear on. Fantastic short video by engineering explained of a V8 engine, using a 3D printed model—

 

Shoot, I wanted to check bearing wear while I was under there and took these pictures (and more) but didn’t know what I was looking at. This has all happened faster than I could do research and studying. Didn’t realize I had to pop off some rod caps to see the bearings... shoot. I had it off and back together all Saturday morning.

I assume it is bearing wear. 145k, 4.5 years of ownership and tried to maintain it like a princess.

Also, 05Turbo, I believe the thicker oil will only make it harder to crank on start, and reduce fuel economy, but because bearing wear results in increased clearances, which is bad, the thickness helps reduce the clearance again, which is good. This is if my understanding of what I’ve crammed in on engine reading this weekend is at all correct, but I might have misunderstood.