Thread: Disassembled my Blown DE but Am Clueless

Well, over the weekend, I finally decided to take my DE apart to take a look at the damage. As some of you know, at the start of the summer, I had 0 compression on cylinder #2. This is what led me to swapping in the VE.

I found the issue. There was a metal shaving that got stuck between 2 valves and the head. The shaving was actually across both an intake and an exhaust valve. After taking the shaving out, the valves appear to be closing snuggly.

This is where things become weird. I have taken the whole block apart, including unmounting the pistons, and everything looks intact. Cylinder walls, pistons, bearings, etc. The head also looks fine from an "external" point of view, but I want to keep it in 1 piece and don't want to screw around with springs and shims before starting to sell stuff.

So, I have a shaving that got stuck in the valves, but I have no idea where it came from.

The only thing I can think of is the fact that I had a new flexpipe welded to my header about a year ago. Could it be possible that some metal residue could have crawled all the way up to the head?

What else could possibly have been damaged? Any ideas? The engine was a fully stock B15 RR SR20DE.

Any insight would be welcome.

i dont think so about the whole header thing, i could see if it was sucked in through the intake manifold but not backwards trough the header.

well its up to you what else could be damaged becase you have the motor apart and can see exactly what your looking at.

IF i was you i would rebuild the motor. i dont know that i would reassemble a motor esp after finding out about metal shaving\s

a simple build ie: have the block remachined, have the head cleaned and all that throw it back together.

its a toss of a coin that you could put it back together and it blow all together becuase of some malfunction

Good point, i'll take a look at the ITM. All I know is I had changed my K&N filter a few days before the failure (I had a CAI), but the screen on the MAF was intact, so I know the shaving came from some place after the MAF. It could be something that came in from the EGR unit as well.

By the way, I was taking it easy/granny driving when it blew (it happened on a surface street with me driving the speed limit by a park), which adds to the oddness of the situation.

yea i was thinking maybe it came from the air intake?

did you piss somebody off? Kinda odd that you can't find where the shaving came from. Had to be decent sized to hold both valves.

The pistons and rings were perfect? You know them RR pistons!

what kind of intake? I had an ebay intake on my civic that i had to use a file on the inside of the pipe where the welds were. there was a good sized chunk just hanging off in there. i've even seen things like that on AEM intakes too.

Piston looks good. I was sure to find a chunked ring land, but no

I have an AEM, but wouldn't the screen on the MAF have caught it? Unless it were on the upper pipe. I had that intake for over 3 years, by the way.

I sold the CAI after getting the VE, so I wouldn't be able to double check. It looked good when I took it out, though.

lol

I don't think I pissed anyone off. The motor did see 5 years of weekly track abuse, though.