Well, not really 101 Ways, but here is coverage on how I have managed to destroy FOUR engines in less than 2 years.

The first time, I managed to blow a piston with a truly BONEHEADED move, and on the street, too. At Battle Of the Imports in November, my boost just was not up to par, I was maxing at 22psi (up at home in NoCal, I could hit 25psi no problem at the track when running avgas/racegas). I tried even disconnecting the wastegate entirely (!!!), and still only got 22 psi, so I pulled the hose to the bleeder. After the race, the boost came back, BUT I left the bleeder disconnected. I drove for the next 3 days hitting 28psi on PUMP 92 octane gas - STUPID, STUPID, STUPID. Blew the piston, but from the TOP, it looked great, and the plugs looked fine. Once I pulled the piston, though, the REAL damage soon showed up. NOT pretty. SO, here it is...

Click on a pic to see the fullsize version.

	This is the piston from the top - looks fine, right? WRONG!!!
	This is the piston with a view of the OBVIOUS damage....but there was MUCH more.
	Here I am, LIFTING OFF part of the upper ring land (OUCH!!!)
	Here I am, getting ready to peel off part of the NEXT ring land. The top ring land chunk is on the towel.
	Here's the second ring land coming off - notice the nice clean break on the first ring land? If I had not gone paranoid, and shut down the car ASAP after problems surfaced, I probably would have lost the block.
	Here is the piston fully apart - HEY! That section isn't supposed to come off!
	Here's a side view - note how much is missing?
	Here are the rings, and the ring land chunks are circled.
	Here's a view of the damage next to the block.
	Here's a view of the piston bore - looks NASTY, but is acutally just scoring through the glazing, it can't be felt AT ALL - honing will take it out.

SO, the damage was bad, but not really bad - easily fixable. I just got one new piston, new rod bearings, new piston rings, and misc gaskets, and honed the block and reassembled. It ran GREAT for the next full year and 19,000 miles (6200 from the drive to/from the Shootout in 97). The I detonated it AGAIN.

This time, I blew the engine from detonation, but it was simply bad luck and bad engineering. In preparation for Shootout 97, I had installed a 20G. However, I had kept the stock IC, and had modified the 90 MAF hose to fit a 2G MAF (which worked GREAT for power and gas mileage). Part of the MAF hose mod required moving the breather hoses, as I had to cut out the section of the MAF hose that had the hose nipples. The way I did it worked well for 5 months. I cut the nipple section out of the MAF hose, and used Automotive Goop to glue it onto the hose lower down. Well, after 5 months, the oil vapor running through the hoses finally made the Goop let go. I was driving it on the street with a max of 15psi, and I stopped at a light, and smoke was coming out from under the hood. I pulled over and looked for the leak, but couldn't find it, so I drove it gingerly home. Then I found the hoses hanging loose. This time, I installed them right, by pulling the steel tubes out of the rubber, and pushing them through the holes I had drilled in the MAF hose.

But it was too late. Two days later, I was driving along, and when I let off the gas to shift, I covered the road with an oil cloud. I recognized this symptom from the last blowup, so I knew I was screwed. I turned the boost way down, and nursed it along for a few days, did a compression check, and one cylinder registered almost zero. So I parked it for a while, preparing for the next engine. Then I tried to drive it the 40 miles to SF to park it and swap engines. BIG MISTAKE. I only made it 20 miles, and the car started misfiring, and then stopped, and wouldn't run reliably. I towed it to SF, and tore it down.

I believe the reason it blew this time is that the hoses falling off leaned out the mixture. That, and cramming a 20G's worth of air through the tiny lower IC pipe to the stock IC (superheating the air) caused detonation that the computer couldn't deal with fully.

	Here's the first hint of which cylinder was the worst - see all the oil out of the #3 exhaust runner?
	Here's the first thing I noticed - TWO of the plugs were annihilated, and 3 of them had their gaps crushed closed or close to it.
	This is a blurry side view. This is why the car died and would not run - I was basically trying to run it on ONE cylinder. It would start, and rev to about 3K, then die, and wouldn't hold any rpm under load at all.
	This is the piston this time - from the top, you could only see a small notch, but you could also see a LOT of peppering from piston ring bits that had popped free and sandblasted the piston. What is interesting is that some of the piston ring pieces got sucked into the intake, and made their way into another cylinder, killing that plug and peppering the top of THAT piston. I actually found a piece of #3 piston ring in another cylinder, while that pistons' rings were fully intact. The large amount of missing ring land section is probably partially because of continuing to drive it after the initial damage. I should have parked it the instant I got that first cloud of smoke.
	Unfortunately, some of those piston ring bits made their way out the exhaust valves, and killed the turbine blades on my 20G.
	On a side note, I had left the engine lift bracket off of the car after the last rebuild. The exhaust manifold nuts on the driver's side backed out a bit, allowing hot exhaust gases to go past the timing belt upper and lower covers. Put that bracket back on, it helps deflect exhaust gasses if the manifold loosens up. This is what can happen if you don't. Here's the lower cover.
	Here's the upper cover.

At this point, I said screw it, and ordered a new racing shortblock from Dave Buschur, so I could try to avoid future problems. I ordered it with forged JE pistons, for more detonation resistance (big mistake, for me at least, as I found out later).

After installing the DaveB racing shortblock, I went to fire it up, and promptly bent 6 valves on my freshly rebuilt and ported head. I had pumped up the lifters with oil (as the Shop Manual says to - it says to pump them to remove all air), and the valves opened too far at startup. After telling several vendors about this, all of them told me they installed lifters empty of oil, and let them clatter like crazy for the first few minutes. D'oh! I wish someone had told me this before I had put the engine back together.

A few weeks later, I had it back together, started it up, and it idled fine. I tested it out by running it for nearly an hour at idle while I checked timing, and futzed with the throttle cable tension, and checked for leaks. Everything was fine, all gauges reading great, so I took it out for about a 5 mile spin in SF to doublecheck it. Ran great, smooth, quiet, so I loaded up all my tools for the 40 mile trip home.

About 20 miles into the trip, in heavy traffic, 5th gear, about 3K rpm, I looked down to see the coolant temp gauge twitch up a needle width. RuhRoh. So I watched traffic for 2 sec, looked at gauge, watched traffic....

A few seconds later, it twitched up another needle width, so I started easing from the left to the far right lane. The engine also started knocking slightly. In the time it took me to cross 5 lanes of traffic, the needle shot up to just under the red zone, so I pulled over and shut it down. As soon as I stopped, steam from the front corner of the hood. Oh shit.

About half my coolant had boiled out (NO idea why to this day). I didn't have any water with me (idiot!), so I waited for some nice person to pull over (checked the oil while I was at it, it was centered on the 2 marks, nice and clean), and started emptying all the 2liter soda bottles I had. After nearly half an hour, somone stopped, headed down the road to get me water, and got back about 15 minutes later. So after about 45 minutes, I started pouring water into the radiator fill cap. Headed OFF of the freeway to take slow roads in case there was a problem (good choice).

A couple minutes later, I heard a nasty scraping noise, then a CLUNK, then the car quit. Luckily I was in the right lane in a 35mph zone in 5th gear spinning not even 2K rpm, so I just yanked it over to the curb and called AAA. When they lifted the front of the car, a bunch of nasty grey oil came out of the oilpan right above the transfer case. So I grabbed a socket and my drainpan, and drained the oil. A LOT more than 4 quarts came out, and it was all nasty grey and thin.

Once I had it back in SF, I started the teardown. The transfer case would not come off. After finally prying real hard with a 16" screwdriver, it proceeded to pop loose and hit me in the face. I was NOT happy. I was even more pissed when I saw several tears in the oilpan, that had locked the transfer case in place. Let me state that this engine failure was not DaveB's fault, nor was it fully mine, I believe. I had told Dave I wanted ARP rod bolts, but he said they'd cause about a month delay, so I said screw it, use stock ones. Well, one of the stock ones snapped.

As for the nasty oil, I THINK the head warped, and when I put water back in it, some got into the oil. At least, that's the only reason I can think of. The knocking was the rod coming apart, and the CLUNK was when the crank pushed the piston/rod up in the bore, spun out from under it (once the bottom rod cap had come off), then the piston/rod sunk down in the bore, and the crank came around and rammed it through the oilpan.

	Here are the tears in the oilpan from the rod ripping through it.
	Here is where the rod tried to go through the side of the block just under the piston bore. Luckily, it didn't, as this block was reusable, as the cracks were only external stress cracks, they didn't go all the way through.
	Here is where the crank rod journal was dented by smacking the rod.
	Here's my 20 mile old $150 racing piston, killed by the rod pieces beating the hell out of the skirt.
	Here is what is left of the rod.

An unfortunate side effect of the rod letting go is that one half of the rod bearing COMPLETELY powdered (for all I know, this caused the rod bolt to break. Or the bolt breaking caused the bearing to disintegrate). I could not find a single piece of that rod bearing half, only powder in the oilpan. As I found out after sending it back to Dave, that powder was elsewhere too. It had circulated through the engine, ruining my cams, all 16 of my brand new lifters, and my brand new oilpump cover and gears. That bearing caused hundreds of dollars of damage when it powdered. It took $1400 to rebuild the engine, even though Dave did his best to minimize the prices (and I DO thank him for that, he has always treated me right).

Fastforward to a week before the Shootout in 98. I managed to pull a hard weekend and get the new engine installed. I shipped Dave the dead block AND the head, and he assembled them. Threw the car together, ran it around town for 500 miles to break it in, then changed the oil to synthetic for the drive to the Shootout.

Less than 200 miles into the trip, the car overheated like crazy, after running fine. I let it cool down, and put water in it. Drove it the rest of the day, parked it for the night, and checked the coolant level the next day. Just a little low, so I topped it up. Took off down the road, all gauges reading fine, and the TMO Datalogger showed everything was fine. Stopped for lunch in Wyoming in the middle of nowhere, after 1500 miles on the new engine, and things were still running fine.

Took off after lunch, cruising at 85mph with the cruise control on. Put a RUSH CD in, cranked it up, checked the gauges again. Everything running straight up where it should be. Looked down less than a minute later, and the temp gauge was pegged full hot. Plugged in the TMO Datalogger, and coolant temp was 261! Then the temp sender started reading really screwy, high/low/high/low. Parked it, let it cool off, and noticed the lower radiator hose clamps were loose. I blew it. I missed tightening them during the engine install. During my frontmount IC install, I had to remove the stock coolant overflow tank as it would not fit. I put an aftermarket one in that did not have a low coolant switch on it. The radiator hose pissed out the coolant slowly once the system was pressurized, and there was no low coolant light to warn me. The stock temp sender is in about the highest place it can be, and as far as Todd and I can figure, it went from reading coolant temp to reading air temp, so it thought everything was fine, when I was really torching the motor.

Quinn Whipple borrowed his dad's dually and a friend's trailer and drove down in the middle of the night from Idaho to get us, after we had gotten on IRC at a motel and told everyone what had happened. Thanks Quinn, and thanks IRC!.

Once we had the head off and off to the machine shop for decking, we took a look at the piston bores. They felt smooth, but the crosshatch was gone, as seen below.

Cylinder 1 front	Cylinder 1 rear
Cylinder 2 front	Cylinder 2 rear
Cylinder 3 front	Cylinder 3 rear
Cylinder 4 front	Cylinder 4 rear

The JE forged racing pistons were just not built for street use, in my opinion. The piston slap inherent in their use had already completely worn off the crosshatching at the top of the piston travel, where they rocked back and forth when the rod was rotating under them, changing from pushing them up to pulling them down.

We got the head back on, and tried to start the engine. It sounded REALLY hollow when turning over. Not Good. Did a compression check, and compression was about 50psi across the board. Really Not Good. As far as I can tell, the pistons overexpanded when the motor overheated, and crushed the piston rings. We couldn't get it started, so we parked the car, and flew home. Todd and I never did make Shootout 98, and I am truly sorry for Todd missing it due to my car troubles.

You can see that cyl4 doesn't look too good. When I pulled that piston, it had expanded far enough to hit the bore, and had badly scratched the piston and bore, and destroyed the rings and part of the skirt.

If anyone wants to buy 3 good .010 over JE pistons already mounted on 90 rods, and a dead .020 over JE piston mounted on a good rod, they are for sale ;-) All the rods are in good shape, and the 3 pistons are still good. The bad piston, and all piston rings, will need to be replaced.

So here it is, April 23, 1999, and after a LONG downtime, and an extreme shortage of funds, I am ready to install yet another block in my car tomorrow. Ironically enough, the original engine block is being reinstalled, with .020 95 pistons in it, fully balanced, with a balanced crank. The dead DaveB block has been bored .040 over and has 95 pistons in it, awaiting a crank. That block will go in my third DSM, that I bought to drive until the red car is running.

I am going to be running NONTURBO for the breakin period, so that crap circulating through the oil doesn't trash my rebuilt 20G (it is now a Stage 3 Texas Rebuild Frankenstein 20G). I have a dummy turbo that has had the turbine shaft/wheel and compressor wheels removed, and the holes welded up, so all it will do is pass coolant and oil through it. I'm going a bit fulltilt with this rebuild, I am removing the AC system, and as soon as I can find a 1.8L manual steering rack real cheap, I will be removing the power steering. The Starquest frontmount IC will stay on for the Shootout (IF I can make it), then I plan on building a really huge custom IC that will use the extra room from removing the AC condenser. This IC will be completely handbuilt, using a Griffin core, and endtanks I will make myself, by beating aluminum sheet over wooden forms for the endtanks. I'll do a VFAQ on it, of course, and may end up selling copies of the IC (IC with endtanks and outlets only, no pipes) to help offset the cost of building the thing.