Quote:
Originally Posted by GregMN
The engine will not seize up in short amount of time w/o oil pressure as long as the cooling system is working properly. Your wife can drive a car 4 miles to the grocery store. Go do her shopping, and drive it home with no oil in the sump and the lifters clacking like a diesel. And over the next 100,000 miles, experience no noticeable ill effect from that event. Go ahead, ask how I know this.
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Maybe if your engine has ball bearings on the crank instead of plain journal bearings. We had a engine on the dyno blow a turbo feed oil line once. The oil pressure alarm went off after it vented most of the crankcase oil, and it was shut down about 10 seconds later. All of the rod bearings were severely scuffed and damaged from running dry for even 10 seconds at 2500rpm and full load. Lead against steel sure does get hot and mate itself together fast. At very low loads you could get away with it for longer as most vehicles have a 2-3second lag of no oil pressure everytime they start, but they aren't under load either. I think a 5psi oil pressure switch that was hooked to a solenoid to supply vaccum to the pump would be a easy emergency shut down device to be installed on these cars.