Back in the 1990's, a banker here in Nebraska had an '87 Buick Park Lane with a 3.8 engine and an engine knock. As I recall, it had about 70K miles on it. He gave it to one of my wife's brothers, Ed, on the condition that it not be parted out or sold to a salvage yard.
Ed brought it to my shop. I dropped the oil pan and found the #1 rod bearing spun, almost unheard of with a 3.8, particularly with that low mileage. It was a nice car, otherwise, so my Ed told me to go ahead and fix it. I pulled and disassembled the engine and sent the crankshaft out to be ground.
The problem was, a fiber cam gear had shredded and the debris had plugged the oil pump. I'd never seen that on a 3.8, but it was common on the old 3.0 engines, and since they both took the same cam gear GM must have used up some fiber cam gears by putting them in some 3.8's.
Anyway, about then the banker contacted Ed with a big sob story that the car had been his late wife's car, that she really loved that car, and he wanted to know if he could have the car back. Ed told him that would be hard to do because the car was at his brother-in-law's shop having the engine rebuilt. The banker said he didn't care, he'd gladly pay the bill on the engine if he could just have the car back.
I went ahead and reassembled the engine with new piston rings, all new bearings, and a new cam gear. When I presented the car and the bill to Ed, he wrote me a check and added $500 to it. He said he'd get more than that out of the banker when he gave him the car back. I never heard how that ended up.
Ed passed away a couple of years ago, but the last we knew the banker's son was still driving the car.
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Today's Featured Article - What Oil Should I Use? - by Francis Robinson. I keep seein this question pop up over and over again in discussion groups all over the web. As with many things there are often several right answers and a few wrong ones. Some purist I'm sure will disagree to no end with what I will tell you but most of us out here in the real world don't really care do we ? Some of them only bring their noses down out of the air long enough to look down them anyway. If you are like me you are only doing this old tractor stuff because you enjoy it. You
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