It’s at all times vital to routinely test and alter your oil. It’s the lifeblood of your engine, in any case, chargeable for lubricating the advanced mixture of metallic items that work collectively to make all that horsepower. Having too little oil will be catastrophic. But having an excessive amount of oil is simply as unhealthy, as this teardown of an overfilled Jaguar engine reveals.

Eric from the I Do Cars YouTube channel managed to get his palms on a 3.0-liter supercharged V6 out of a 2017 Jaguar XE sedan that failed as a result of it was severely overfilled with oil. According to the salvage yard that offered the engine, 9 quarts of oil got here out of the pan when it was drained. Maximum capability for this engine is simply 5.7 quarts.

Teardown of the heads present indicators one thing’s gone mistaken. This engine has solely been used for 66,000 miles, so every little thing appears comparatively clear. But metallic flakes within the oil filter and scarring within the cam journals level to catastrophic injury within the block. 

Sure sufficient, as soon as the heads come off, Eric finds the 2 forwardmost pistons are now not correctly secured to the crankshaft. He additionally discovers they’ve beforehand made contact with the top — one thing that is not speculated to occur in regular operation. Taking off the oil pans reveals a ton of torn-up rod bearing materials, together with a number of large chunks. That explains the free pistons, then.

Taking the pistons out reveals a bunch of burnt metallic on the backside of the connecting rods and a bunch of injury to the cylinder partitions. When an engine is overfilled with oil, the crankshaft splashes the surplus oil round within the crankcase, turning it to foam. When that foam is sucked into the oil pump it aerates the oil to the purpose the place it could actually now not lubricate the metallic. The result’s a bunch of friction and warmth that, left untreated, will rapidly kill a motor. And that is precisely what occurred right here.

Take this Jaguar V6’s destruction as an indication to learn to test your oil correctly. Or you possibly can find yourself with a bricked engine.