Help! Blew an oil cooler hose.

Hey Guy's, here is my current situation.

I have a 1980 B, the engine was rebuilt a couple thousand miles ago. I am in the process of moving, and yesterday I was transporting the car from my old house to my new house, the drive is 6.5 miles total. Anyway, about 4 miles into the drive the car suddenenly lost a lot of it's acceleration power and when l looked at the gauges I noticed I had no oil pressure. When I opened the hood I noticed one of the lines to my oil cooler blew and there was oil all over the hood and componets of the engine.

Anyway, I guess my question is, in this situation is a major loss of power normal? I didn't hear any sounds that really indicated anything rattling in the engine, and I didn't have any smoke coming from my exhaust. The oil I run in the car is RotellaT 30 and I usually put Marvel's Mystery Oil in the car too.

Should the replacement of the oil hose fix the problem or is there probably more damage there.

Thanks for the help.

Justin

I should probably add that the engine temp did not go above normal range.

Not sure about the loss of power, but if you didn't hear any knocks, etc., you may have lucked out. How much oil did you lose?

Get the hose(s) replaced, and see what happens.

Mickey Richaud said:

Not sure about the loss of power, but if you didn't hear any knocks, etc., you may have lucked out. How much oil did you lose?

Get the hose(s) replaced, and see what happens.

Click to expand...

I didn't hear any knocks, the valve tapping got a little louder but nothing I was concerened about. Maybe I should be?

I think I lost almost all of it. This happened LATE last night like 11:00pm and so I had the car towed home put it in the garage and haven't done anything other than purchase a new hose and post on the forum.

If you had a power loss then something was getting tight from lack of lube OR the oil affected something on the ignition system maybe???? I hope it turns out ok for you. Been there ....Bob

The aspect to remember is that the oil does the major amount of cooling for the bottom end, and the water/coolant does most all of the cooling for the top end and combustion chamber. So the water temperature may never go up with a loss of oil until something really bad happens. Bob is right, if the car started to loose power, then the bearings, most likely the rods, were starting to tighten. All you can do is put it back together and try it. I would also change the oil filter. Don't forget to crank the engine over without spark, until there is oil pressure. Then start it and let it idle. Listen for weird sounds and check the oil pressure. If it starts making bad sounds, or the pressure is too low, shut it off and investigate.
Good luck.
These engines are sturdy, and there is a good chance it will be OK.
Scott in CA

UPDATE:

The car seems to overall be fine. I replaced my distributor (which I had planned to anyway) to an electronic one, and I changed the coil to a 40,000V coil.

Finally, I fixed to broken oil cooler hose by unhooking the bad hose all together and then unhooked the oil cooler and re-routed the good hose to get the car running and fix it until I can get a new hose.

There seems to be no damage that I can find. The car runs as it always has and I don't see any smoke coming from the tailpipe. The only thing that I have a question about is now when I crank the car, the oil pressure runs about 75psi, however after driving it for a while, after the car heats up, I am getting a reading of about 20-30psi, and when I start driving it normally stays around 50psi. Before the above issue happened, the oil pressure consistentally ran at 75psi.

One thing I forgot about was trying to crank it without the plugs to get the pressure back up that way. I did a complete oil change on it as well and used RotellaT 30W.

Any ideas on what could be causing this? If so how can I fix it?

Thanks,

Justin

Usually bearing wear causes more drop when hot.

If you has 75 before, and 50 now, hot, with the same oil, my eddycated guess is there is some bearing damage or wear the engine has experienced due to oil loss.

Just watch it.

Might be an anomaly, too.

TOC said:

Usually bearing wear causes more drop when hot.

If you has 75 before, and 50 now, hot, with the same oil, my eddycated guess is there is some bearing damage or wear the engine has experienced due to oil loss.

Just watch it.

Might be an anomaly, too.

Click to expand...

Well the car starts cold at 75psi, it just goes down to 50 and lower after I've been driving it for a little while.

Worn bearings generally show up in lower oil pressure when hot.
Been watching this happen for too many decades.

If:

Your sender and gauge are the same as before,
and if the oil you put in is EXACTLY the same type as was in it before,
and if the car is not running substantially hotter,

the only thing that would cause lower pressure is either worn bearings or possibly lack of restrictive flow through hoses and cooler.

Don't panic until you get the cooler hooked back up.

Don't panic then either!

50 is fine driving, most older LBC's I see drop quite low at hot idle, it's just different than it was.

Thanks for your help. I will order the new hose this week and get it hooked up!

I'll keep you posted!

Hmm... I'm sayin' bearings too. Unfortunately this is now happening with my Spider. Good pressure when first started but on a journey at highway speeds the pressure slowly goes down below where it should be, as the heat sinks thru the engine. I ~know~ it's bearing wear. As Dave says, seen it happen too many times over decades.

You might get away with dropping the pan and swapping rod shells, but that'd only be a half-arsed cure. The mains took the same punishment.

Does anyone else think that 30wt is a little thin for Southern Texas?

I always ran 10w/40 (Castrol GTX) in my MGBs when I lived in Southern Louisiana (and 20w/50 GTX in the Healey).

Edit: pulling an oil sample and sending it off to Blackstone labs will verify the presence (or absence) of trace elements. I do this on every oil change, and have been for some 2-1/2 decades.

Sample reports can be seen here: https://www.rfdm.com/Randy/Maintenance/oilAnalysis/01/ Clicking on the date at the bottom will bring up the actual report(s).
Note: Daniel has gotten behind at posting the results, but I'm still testing at every change (X 3 cars).

30W, depends on the vehicle.
I run only 30W HD in all my other vehicles, some for over 300K on one engine, hot, cold......

But, the issue is the details.

Same oil as before (just new), and much lower oil pressure after popping the hose off and driving it.

Now, in my LBC, it's 20W-50.

We've kept 20W-50 Castrol here in Florida as the lube of choice for 25 years in the LBC's we've serviced. No issues that could be attributed to it as being too "thin". Oil pressure (largely tho not exclusively) is a result of bearing clearance.

DrEntropy said:

We've kept 20W-50 Castrol here in Florida as the lube of choice for 25 years in the LBC's we've serviced. No issues that could be attributed to it as being too "thin". <span style="font-weight: bold">Oil pressure (<span style="text-decoration: underline">largely tho not exclusively</span>) is a result of bearing clearance.</span>

Click to expand...

I agree, but I've also seen terribly worn rockershafts, usually from inadequate lubrication, take down the oil pressure.

If it were me, I'd be doing the following:

#1 do an oil analysis
#2 change oil__and filter__(in conjunction with #1 above) to 20w/50 Castrol GTX
#3 act on results of #1

In most cases, a single oil analysis isn't of too much benefit; the goal is to establish a trend. Continued oil analysis allows you to monitor the engine's condition by watching the results of routine samples, whether they're annual, twice annually, after every race, or whatever the circumstances may dictate.

With an extreme event, such as blowing out all the oil, an analysis could very well eliminate all the guesswork that we're doing here. They only cost $25.00 and Blackstone will send out the sample kits ahead of time for free__you only have to pay when you utilize their service. https://www.blackstone-labs.com/free-test-kits.php

Honestly, under these circumstances, I cannot imagine why an owner wouldn't do it.

I thought oil coolers were discoutinued in late '74 on North American cars and they just ran a bypass hose from the block to the oil filter adapter.

PaulP said:

I thought oil coolers were discoutinued in late '74 on North American cars and they just ran a bypass hose from the block to the oil filter adapter.

Click to expand...

They were available as an option. There are two captive nuts that can be seen on the bottom radiator panel. The cooler hung below this shelf, behind the front valance, on the right hand side of the car.