Ode to the 2.4...50k with no oil pressure!
 

First of all, I'm an idiot. Let's get that out of the way first.

I’ve posted here a couple of times but for those of you who don’t know, I’ve got a 2.4 diesel that I adapted to my Land Rover five years ago. It’s been a great motor, has taken me all across the U.S. and has been a perfect engine for off-roading. As you can imagine, there was quite a bit of modifications I had to do to get this engine in the Land Rover and to get everything to work. One of the things was to modify the oil filter housing as it wouldn’t fit at the Land Rover firewall. No biggie…I cut the top off, welded a plate and a bung and run a remote oil filter while still using an oil cooler.

http://seriestrek.com/buildimages/oi...sing%20III.jpg

Well, after everything was hooked up I noticed I didn’t have much oil pressure. The needle moved a little bit but I wasn’t concerned. It would push about 20lbs. cold going down the road, 10lbs. warm and literally no oil pressure at an idle. Chock it up to a bad gauge and I’ll change it later. The hoses, filter and cooler are getting hot, there’s oil splashing around on the cam, everything must be OK.

Jump ahead five years and 50k miles later, and the engine was getting a little noisy. It still runs OK and it’s got less than 200k on it, but it’s getting hard to start in the cold and I’ve got a lot of blow-by. Must have been that time I overheated it twice in the same day while off-roading in Colorado. I change out the engine with a 67k mile one I found a couple months ago. Got all that done last weekend and I figure while I’m at it, I’d better change out that gauge. I want to be sure everything is working right.

Well, I put a new gauge on it tonight and it’s exactly the same. I start poking around, running things through in my head and looking at another oil filter housing that I have here and realize that I screwed something up in the oil filter housing that’s on the truck when I re-assembled it. There’s a stem that goes though the middle of the filter that keeps a couple of passages separate. I neglected to put that back in and the oil is splashing around in there willy-nilly.

I know I’m an idiot and I should have caught this a LONG time ago, but the reason for my post is this:

I’ve been running this poor 2.4 for 50,000 miles with very little or no oil pressure!!! In case you didn’t get that the first time…50,000 miles with no oil pressure!!!

Tell me, what other engine ever built could take such abuse?

Yes, I’m fixing it tomorrow or the next day and no, I’m not driving it until I do.

holy $hi! 50k and still running (somewhat). Thats something to brag about.

Yikes!
Did you know that MB makes a filter housing for that engine that points back and down instead of straight up? They put it in their vans (207d, 307d etc). They're a dime a dozen in Europe. I know some MB breakers in the UK that could probably sell one to you cheap if you wanted to keep the original filter setup and you have enough room to point it backwards.
I've got one on a 617 engine in my 409d.