And the couple or 3 pan bolts in the front that you need to be a contortionist and the tools to go with it.

 

I had my teenager get those.

 

I just took it for a drive to get the engine up to temp. Oil pressure stays ~50-55 i would guess....well above 40 consistently. Once the engine warmed up it sounds like a ticking, but i can hear it loudest with the scope on the side of the block above the oil pan. Don't really hear anything from the top side. Could it be a lifter? Maybe I'm dealing with a couple different ticky things? Warm and at idle, it seems to come and go in surges (every 20 seconds or so)...it'll last a few seconds and then taper off for the most part.

Maybe I loosened something up during the Seafoam process that is now causing a problem...didn't seem to do this before.

 

I don't trust the factory oil pressure gauge. It lies....... big time. It was telling me I had 40 pounds pressure, even though the little low-pressure lite was on..... My understanding is, the OPS sends a signal to the PCM, and the PCM then tells the gauge what to read. I think there are some issues there, as my mechanical gauge was telling me over 60 pounds at idle (after the pump change, engine fully warmed) but, the dash gauge never budged off 40.......

 

Now that I think about it, another difference in the setup from before I started the plenum fix(es) is that I'm using 5W30...I have always used 10W30 in the past. Any chance that could come into play with this issue?

 

Anything is possible. I run 10w30 year round here in the great brown north.

 

Try pulling one plug wire at a time with engine running (or you can unplug one injector at a time), and see if the knock goes away. If it does you can pin point that it is a bearing. My oil pressure never showed abnormally low when I had the bad bearings.

I ran the 5w-30 synthetic in my truck for a while, then I developed bearing problems. After tearing the engine down, just about every bearing was damaged, but there was only one rod that was making the noise. If I had kept running the engine, I would have had major problems.

This is a video with the bad bearings: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFF8B..._order&list=UL


This is a video of after the rebuild: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5pKT..._order&list=UL

 

trucklover: that sounds very similar to what I have going on.

I'm going to do a compression check today and see if it is even worth digging any deeper.

 

Be nice if it was something as simple as an exhaust leak!!

 

Here's the compression results...not sure what "normal" for an engine with +150K should be. FSM says 100psi. first number is dry, second is wet. I tried two different gauges and found ~8psi difference between the two, so I split the difference.

#1 - 80/110
#2 - 68/80
#3 - 78/80
#4 - 85/85
#5 - 70/75
#6 - 65/78