360 modena spark issues

Oh $h$%! That sucks! I wouldn't have guessed that with what you were describing...

Bad belt? Bad tensioner? or.... bad bearing? Locked up and shredded the belt?

When was the last timing belt change and who did it?

I'm VERY surprised more codes did spit out...

 

sorry to hear that. Might be less to get a salvage motor?

 

So sorry , what a nightmare. Did water on the belt contribute to the failure perhaps?

 

Yikes. What are your plans with the car?

 

I hose my engine often and use compressed air to blow excess water, then let air dry before I fire up the engine. But I do take precaution not to wet the front of the engine because of the belts.

Is it possible that you've used soapy detergent or a degreaser and wetted the timing belt? That will probably cause it to skip a few teeth when you crank the engine.

 

With proper tension, I don't think the belt would skip off the gear.

The main question is when were the belts last replaced and who did them. A belt shredding to me means either a component was installed incorrectly or those belts haven't been changed in a very long time. These belts usually don't fall apart...something caused the belt to become misaligned and begin to self destruct.

 

I would tend to agree. Plus I wonder if the the initial mis-firing the OP experienced wasn't unrelated to the broken belt and bent valve problems. A couple of times he posted that the car ran OK or close to OK, at least for a while. Several minutes of idling, for example, with an entire bank of bent valves seems unlikely.

I've only had two engines with cam drive problems. One, a Honda with a single belt simply quit but it wasn't an interference engine, so the fix was easy. The other car, a Porsche 911, broke a cam chain on one bank and it kept running, but it was REAL crappy and it made all kinds of really horrible mechanical noises and backfiring through the carburetters, etc. Anyone with any mechanical sense would shut it down immediately, which is what I did. The repair was very costly.

I don't know about a Ferrari engine with only one bank of operating cams, but I suspect a bank of bent valves would raise holy hell even at idle and would be cause for an immediate shut down if it ran at all.

I hope the OP will keep us updated and perhaps reflect on the problem to determine if he thinks he had one problem, or two. In other words, was it a broken belt all along?

 

Sorry for the OP.
This is everyone's worst nightmare. Hope everything turns out ok. At least time is on your side, you have the whole winter to get it back in shape.

 

Kind of makes me rethink getting into a 360 instead of a 430/Gallardo....

Even more reason if you do the timing belts yourself to make sure that you use a torque wrench and tighten everything via torque specs AND to turn the engine over to make sure the belts move freely and under proper tension....

 

There are always more details to the story.. the one I'm most interested in is the last belt job, and when and who did it.

I've seen the belts in the car. The new ones have Kevlar webbing on the toothed side of the belt. This makes it hard for the teeth to self destruct and shred. To be properly aligned and running without noises makes me think the alignment issue would emerge in the first few hundred miles or so after a belt installation. Other causes I can think of would be oil leak onto the belts with degredation, frozen bearing that shreads things, or loose tension on the belt that leads to tooth skipping and destruction.

If it were my car, I'd just park it, drain the coolant and oil, remove the air intake remove the cylinder head, and rebuild it myself. Or, I'd buy a cheap "used" engine and throw it in.

 

There are horror stories with almost all cars, and the bad ones tend to get air-time... 430 can have its issues too, E-diff, headers, ... There was the recent Scud with header issues and then subsequent Fabspeed header install gone wrong (by auth. F-dealer) with supposedly lots of derivative costly repairs...

 

I would do the same, rebuilding the head can't be too costly, except for parts. I'm sure a local machine shop can figure out how to assemble it without issue...the more tedious part is going to be removal of the pistons. At that point, I, personally, would be looking to upgrade the pistons/rods, and doing the research for clearances of the crank, piston rings, etc....maybe find just the engine to remove and replace.

The Ferrari V8, I'm sure, is not an anomaly and is still a V8 that is not different from disassembly/assembly from any other V8.....pay an independent mechanic to rip it apart and reassemble and I bet you could say $10k of that....my BMW mechanic buddy and I rebuilt my '91 2.5L M20 motor and the BMW M70 (V12) is essentially two of the M20s....not eveyone wants a Ferrari engine hanging on a stand, but it would be kind of cool in the garage to at least look at, dissect....see if the local shop courses want to take it and rebuild it!

 

If it happens to me and a piston isn't cracked (as I suspect they aren't here).. I'd take the top end off, take the camshafts off, and rebuild/replace what's needed. I'd even have valves fabbed if I needed it. Big issue I hear is the lifters not being available.. IF no damage there and they seat fine with new valves I'd put it back together and drive the $%^t out of it.

Granted I haven't seen the lifters out of car or up close, and I would presume minimal damage to valve seats and guides in my above statement. Reassemble and fab a pressure testor that sits atop the intake or exhaust and pressurize it. If it holds pressure with no/minimal leakdown then install it.

 

Yeah, but the valves probably put some nicks/cracks into the piston crowns...especially since the PO continued to start the car, and rev up the motor....

 

That's an interesting thought. I know its a zero clearance head... with valves bending, how much damage is there to the piston head? Assuming valves maximally deflects, how much "sapce" to accomodate is there in there?

There have been discussions about replacing pistons. Some have argued they are robust, others have argued that they couldn't sleep without new pistons. Personally, I'd clean it off, then use a UV dye to suggest any cracks. If cracked then yeah replace it or get a used engine.. but if just a nick I might even take it down, polish it and rebuild. That way if it cracks completely int eh future or you get a knock, you at least got some use out of it before serious work. It's kinda interesting isn't it. With a disintegrating precat, its the same place you end up.

I argue its preference in the absence of visible damage.

 

I've just seen on other motors that any kind of indent can lead to hot spots on the piston.....but you're right, if there are no confirmed indents/cracks, then just replace the bent valves and drive on!

 

I have disconnected all L and all R bank COPs (coil over packs) on my 430, one side at a time. It runs JUST FINE! Its a V8, thats 2x 4 cyl, 4 stroke, engines. But come to think of it my 1 cyl 4 stroke motorcycle ran fine on 1x cyl. So a 4 stroke will run smooth with 4x cyl, better with 6, and even better with 8.

I can see him being able to drive it with 200HP. It should also idle fine (not perfect), with a missing feel compared to running on all 8, but it should idle and run.

Would the pressure washing have caused this? Maybe. Not likely or we would read about this more often. Possible situations:
1. Hydra-lock; could cause the the valve to not fully close if water was forced behind it, assuming the unlikely event that water somehow got into the intake, maybe through a direct pressure spraying of the outer air inlet, filling the air box, then a hard breaking pushing a wave into the intake or something. The intake runners extend quite high in the intake manifold, so unlikely but plausible.
2. Water lubricated a belt that was under factory tension specs, causing it to slip. Once it slipped a few teeth, the valve train would experience excess resistance from the piston contact, thus causing further slippage, heat, and self destruction.

I repeat that water was not likely the culprit.

OP: Very, very sorry to hear about your misfortune.

Replace pistons? Only fix whats broken; thats my mantra.

 

Sounds like a cam variator broke. With the additional starting and running it probably shredded the belt. When mine went (latest part number) it just lost power. In the pit the only way to start it was with the pedal floored. Like the OP said. We knew something was wrong by the sound so I shut it down.

The insides may look like this:
http://www.ferrarichat.com/forum/ferrari-parts-collectibles/399696-360-motor.html

Also - IFS is a great shop.

 

Ok, no argument there if all you do is take away the ignition. But we're talking about something entirely different. See how your engine runs when you stop one bank of cams but still supply those cylinders with fuel and ignition as the pistons suck in a fuel air mixture in and then pump it back out through the intake while firing the spark plugs at just the wrong time. Having experienced that with my Porsche many years ago, I guarantee the result is far from fine. It's horrible, or a least it was in my case and I suspect a V8 Ferrari would be horrible too. I seriously doubt if a broken cam belt would produce an engine which would run nearly OK part of the time.

That's why I wonder if the OP actually had two problems, the first being bad ignition or perhaps some other intermittent problem and then the death blow was the failed cam drive belt.

 

Was there not a recall on the cam variators?

If I'm not wrong they were upgraded on 2002 and onwards.

 

If it was me I probably would have just replaced the valves, dremelled off the broken end of the variator from the camshaft, got a new variator and put it on.. assembled it and drove the $@#% out of it. I might even have removed the topend with the engine still in the car!

peterdavid911, they did. The part that brakes off, the neck of the variator is thicker in the newer part.

 

Slow down light is for CATS getting to hot. Thermocouple is connected to CATS which is connect to Temperature Control Station. You have two of them which is mounted on frame right and left side and one per CAT. If temp control station are old, they leak moisture at the top and send wrong signal. Buy one and install, if light goes away your good, if not remove and place on other side. Make sure you silicone top edge to help with the leaking of moisture. The thermocouple very rarely goes bad.