BJ64

This is what I suspected from the start with my engine - that it was assembled with no lube anywhere whatsoever.

It only had two short runs on the test bench before the cam gears let go. Hardly surprising in retrospect. I could not believe how dry the front end of my engine was when I opened it up.

During the short runs, there was a lot of oil coming out of the breather pipe (evident by the nice film of slime on my test bed). But probably not long enough runs to push lube up into the front end if it hadn't been pre-lubed to start with. Combined with running up and down the rev range with only the occasional burst of WOT, I don't think the motor stood a chance of throwing enough fuel/oil up past the bearing plate

The front end of my motor was virtually BONE DRY. The tappets had black dust on them instead of sludge, the cam gears showed only a little oil sheen on the predominantly dry oil-hardened metal, the rockers were pretty much the same, and the pushrods looked like they'd been wiped clean with a rag. Plus the main 16003 bearing felt like it had been washed in thinners - squeaky dry.

I can't see that releasing a dry engine like this is normal practice. Unfortunately, it's not simply a matter of pulling a cap off somewhere and giving it a good dose of oil - pulling these things apart to fire some oil in there before your first run is a fair task and not something you'd expect you'd have to do.

As mentioed previously, the only other way is to probably dump a gutfull of oil in there via the breather and stand it on its nose to allow gravity to do the work, and then occasionally turn the motor over by hand to help disperse the oil onto the other moving parts.

Perhaps this is just a batch of engines that slipped through the 'grease and oil-change' section of assembly?

I think prospective ASP 400 owners are all the more wiser if they happen to read this thread before they fire their engine up for the first time.

I'm not sorry I bought mine - not for a minute.

But I am a bit miffed that there seems to be an absence of care and attention to detail regarding pre-run lubrication - even a 2 second spray of WD40 would have alleviated a lot of problems.

And it sure as eggs would have shown up if the engines were test run

BJ