Yes, I would agree
Unless you can find a definitive cause for the coolant in the oil and the broken lifter guides I wouldn't put any more money in that engine as is
And yes that cam should not be reused
Go to car-part.com
And see if there is a 3.0l OHV long block available in your zipcode
Just like
@RonD said, I refused to put my truck back together until I definitively knew the true cause of the lifter damage. I hate to admit the root cause of all the damage was such a stupid, easily avoidable mistake, but here's what happened.
I'll start where I left off. I found my 2 missing lifter rollers still in the lifter holes, sitting on my camshaft. I pulled them out with a magnet, inspected them, and found that luckily no needle bearings were missing. However, one of the lifters had obvious damage sustained from heavy impact.
I originally wrote this post after pulling my heads and seeing the lifter damage, but it was not until I pulled the front engine cover off to clean metal shavings that I saw the actual root cause of all my problems.
When I pulled my front engine cover, I saw my camshaft bolt was completely backed out, threads and bolt head slightly damaged, just sitting on my timing chain. When I installed my camshaft bolt the movement of my timing chain sprockets did not allow me to fully torque down the bolt. I don't specifically remember torqueing the camshaft bolt down any special way the first time around. My best guess is that while working late at night (one of many, many late nights) I might have taken a break after setting the timing chain + sprockets in place and forgot to fully torque it down when I resumed working again.
The rotation of the camshaft caused my camshaft bolt to back out and ram a ~1-inch hole straight through my front engine cover into my water pump. So the mixing of the Oil/Coolant was from the hole in the timing cover and the camshaft/lifter damage was caused by the camshaft being completely loose in place.
At this point, I had gotten multiple opinions on my camshaft and decided it needed replacing. The conclusion was that there was no damage that would have caused immediate problems but over time that small amount of damage would have caused undue wear on all the related components.
I was looking at 250$ for a new camshaft and 275$ for a new front engine cover. I decided 500$+ was worth a full day at the junkyard so I got to work on the only junkyard car with my engine, a 1994 3.0 Aerostar half an hour from my house.
I was able to pull the
rockers, pushrods, lifters, lifter guides, front engine cover, and camshaft for a total of 128$!
Soaked them all in gasoline for 2 days (sloshed it around here and there), then each part was inspected for damage (everything looked pretty pristine) and individually cleaned with gas + a vibrating toothbrush, then soaked in 5W-20 motor oil overnight.
So the last step of the process was cleaning all contaminated oil and metal chunks/shaving out of my engine.
I used about 2.5 gallons of 70% gasoline and 30% 5W20 oil mixture to be able to effectively wash down all the contaminates without stripping all my engine components of lubrication. I sprayed the mixture with spray bottles, sloshed it directly into my camshaft area, and used magnets for hours on end pulling every fragment of metal out of the block that I could reach. Side note, although my gas/oil mix worked perfectly for my situation, I Inhaled wayy too much gas vapor during this job. Even with my garage wide open and a fan going, I felt dizzy and disoriented while/after cleaning and needed to take breaks when it got bad. Honestly took a week to feel 100% again.
I got about 10 metal chunks and a bunch of tiny shavings out and pieced them back onto my lifters to see how much I was missing.
There were evidently 6 chunks still missing in my block somewhere after the intense cleaning, that is the best I could do. I was only able to clear my camshaft travel area (which is somewhat enclosed with oil journals throughout) with some level of certainty as I could easily look around, reach with magnets, and wash it out thoroughly. As a last-ditch effort, I bought a
super-strong neodymium magnetic drain plug on amazon for 25$ to recover the missing metal in my block. I also was able to recover the piece of my front engine cover that broke off from the water jackets in my block. I used a straw and vacuum to pull up all the non-magnetic chunks of timing chain cover out of the block and felt very confident that I recovered everything.
After figuring out that the improperly torqued camshaft bolt was the real cause of the lifter damage and was satisfied with my somewhat lackluster cleaning job, I felt confident to start reassembling my engine.
I bought new head gaskets, head bolts, intake gaskets, valley seals, timing chain cover gasket, and water pump gasket.
I put r
ed Loctite on my camshaft bolt after thoroughly cleaning the threads and bolt hole with brake cleaner, then
torqued the new camshaft bolt down to 30ft/lb. The rest of the job went pretty smoothly.
I filled her up with 90% water 10% coolant and some cheap oil, and started her up. I perfected the timing, added coolant over the course of an hour, then took her on a couple of trips up and down my street. Everything sounded great!
I kept topping off the coolant over the next 24 hours and out 60 miles on it, then flushed the coolant and drained the oil. The oil change was the happy ending to the story as seen below.
EXACTLY 6 CHUNKS OF METAL STUCK TO MY NEODYMIUM DRAIN PLUG along with a bunch of metal shavings.
Filled her up with some Mobil 1 high mileage 5w20, 75/25 coolant/water. and called it a done job. After 22 days straight of working in the garage, my truck is finally running again and 200+ miles post-rebuild. No dripping on my driveway and she's running stronger than ever.
She lives again!
Thank you guys for all your input, I really appreciate the community here.