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92 Volvo 240 engine chaos- What is this spring from my oil pan? What happened here?
Hello everyone. This is my first forum post on this.
I have a 1992 Volvo 240 wagon with a b230f and m47 manual trans. This thing only has 100k miles and the ODO does seem to work. (Unless maybe this engine was swapped)
I just bought it. The engine had a horrible misfire before I bought it, and I figured I’d fix it no problem. long story short I narrowed it to a stuck injector, got it unstuck, and it seemed to run very well. I drove it 2 times relatively short distances and it ran great. Randomly, I went to pull it out of my garage and it sounded horrible. Went through a couple of fundamental checks and then went straight to compression checking to save time wasting.
From front to back- 180-180-0-80
I took the valve cover off and instantly saw valves stuck when turning hand.
Next, I did a leak down test. First 2 cylinders had about 19% leak down. (Not ideal or great but acceptable). These 2 were most notably leaking to the crank case. Maybe rings. But nothing overly alarming. The back 2 had 85% leak down. Back cylinder (80psi compression one) had a leak in the exhaust valve. The 3rd cylinder in front of it with 0 psi was leaking from both the exhaust and intake valve.
I pulled the head, and the pistons didn’t look horrible. The valve were covered in carbon, but I didn’t think a big deal of it. The back piston looks like it may have got hot, but that was the one where the injector was stuck so it washed a lot of the carbon. (Pictures will be added). The walls didn’t look bad either.
Now, I figured “okay, I’ll just do a valve job and be good to go”. I decided to drain the oil and check just to make sure and found tons of metal flakes and these unknown springs. (Image attached)
I’ve read that these could be the oil pump relief valve spring but I’m not fully sure. It’s clearly too small to be a valve spring or anything. I’m really lost as to what happened here. The 240 ran very well and then just seemed to grenade. Would the oil pressure relief valve giving out cause these valves to stick and lead to this whole compression loss disaster?
Please let me know your thoughts. Anything is appreciated. I know valves stuck make sense for sitting a long time, but all this metal and stuff blowing up doesn’t seem like typical issues for these engines, especially with 100k, even with sitting a long time. I am not sure what happened here.
edit- its also clear that there was tons of stop leak in this engine. The coolant jackets are clearly plugged, and when I took the head bolts off, there were flakes of metal. It didn't look like it took the threads out of the head to me; it looked like that metal material some stop leak stuff causes.
92 Volvo 240 engine chaos- What is this spring from my oil pan? What happened here?
