Definitely would not bode well for my arriving anywhere on time, but does it make any awful metallic grinding noise, or just quietly seize up?
I have never personally done this. But I would think that I would hear some godawful rod knock as the bearings fail.
It seizes up.
I took an old beater that I hadn’t driven for a while out for a spin a long time ago. The low oil light had burned out, and it simultaneously developed a leak. Also it was my first car and I hated it. After about 10 minutes of hiway driving, the car started to inexplicably slow down. Despite increasing the pressure on the gas, the car got slower and slower until it wouldn’t move. The whole process was silent- no funny noise or smoke, just inexorable slow-down. It did make loud screeches when I attempted to restart it though. 
Typically it would either seize up with little or no noise, or develop a knocking sound until a rod broke. Only way to know which will happen with your particular engine is to try it and see. 
I did this once with a Chevy Sprint. A real “beater” if I’ve ever seen one. Lots of knocking until the rod slammed into the block. It was proper fucked.
No sound? rod out of wack sounds like you have a tommy-gun under your hood.
A bunch of my friends went in the car of one of them to the Spencer Fair. On the way back home the car started running hot and then it began to miss, they thought, and then it finally quit. Upon trying to start the engine they found that the starter wouldn’t turn the thing over.
After the car was towed back to Cherokee the engine was torn down. The pistons were all seized in the block. One of the connecting rods had broken off up near the writst pin and was so hot that it bent over and ran into the adjacent rod which bent the broken one around itself in a U shape. All in all a mess.
The lucky thing, I guess, for the driver was that the car was a new Ford and his dad was the local Ford dealer.
Made a cross country trip with a friend in her Fiat, a couple of hundred miles some on motorways. Something must’ve stuck me as odd (I don’t remember maybe it was running hot) so on arrival I decided to check the oil. Dipsick came out dry - not a drop. We topped it up for the trip back but the next time she tried to use it, it wouldn’t go. Turns out the head had got warped.
So looks like you really shouldn’t drive round with no oil. But the engine doesn’t actually explode, it just gradually melts.
Hey, remember those info-commercials from a few years back where they used the miracle lubricant and then ran the engine without oil for something like 24 hours? Where are they now?
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- Not a car engine, but a funny story. At a place where I worked, there was a guy with the floor service who scrubbed and buffed the floors each night. The buffer was a push-mower style thing with a big round pad that turned on the bottom, and that had a one-cylinder 11-HP engine on it. One day the seal around where the shaft sticks out the bottom starts leaking and oil wouldn’t stay in it, and left a thin film on the floor. The floor guy looked and acted like a total inbred racist redneck, but to his credit, he did check the oil in the thing daily, and so he knew when it started leaking just by watching the oil level daily, even though one couldn’t easily see it leaving any trail of oil on the floor–you had to know to look for it. We heard him arguing on the phone that using it that way would only sieze it up, and cost a lot more to fix.
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- His manager told him that they couldn’t get another one in for a few days, and so to just go ahead and try to use it. So he puts oil in it, starts it up and commences to buffing the floor. The thing ran for about six or eight minutes at its regular full speed, then began to slow down a little bit, maybe 20%?, and then goes PING!!! and totally stops running. And after that the shaft wouldn’t turn at all.
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I have a 67 kadett opel. I use lead additive and Deisel oil. Btw I live in the US. so I took a cruise in my classic auto… and well now all I have is a really rare, big, paper weight.
The oil light came on so I pulled over and in the time that it took me to get it the one mile left my house I managed to bend two rods. God only knows what could have happend any further of a distance.
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- I remember the ones for the “teflon” oil additives, but I don’t remember any specific ones. Slick-50 was one that did TV commercials with wild claims, but I don’t remember if they ever claimed that. The ones that did were usually only advertised on TV, the regular auto parts store didn’t carry them. They said that their products had teflon that worked so well that they could drain the oil out and let the engine idle for like 15 minutes or something without hurting it–but they didn’t drive it or anything. But still–>Yea sure–try doing that with the CEO’s Ferrari and see how he feels about it.
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- I remember the ones for the “teflon” oil additives, but I don’t remember any specific ones. Slick-50 was one that did TV commercials with wild claims, but I don’t remember if they ever claimed that. The ones that did were usually only advertised on TV, the regular auto parts store didn’t carry them. They said that their products had teflon that worked so well that they could drain the oil out and let the engine idle for like 15 minutes or something without hurting it–but they didn’t drive it or anything. But still–>Yea sure–try doing that with the CEO’s Ferrari and see how he feels about it.
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Yeah, but you could probably do something like that with any engine in good shape, even without the special product in it.
Well, without its seizing within the 15 minutes. But that 15 minutes of running with hardly any oil shortened the engine’s life by the equivalent of many tens of thousands of miles of normal use. They don’t tell you how long the engines last after that little demonstration. I’m sure they let people assume the engine wasn’t harmed, but it was. Chances are they knew that if they ran it that way for 16 minutes, it would be destroyed.
You are correct about the teflon stuff. I have seen demonstration and county fairs and such where they have an engine running without the valve covers and without the oil pan, due to their super-duper (snake-) oil additive. The truth is, is that you could do this with any oil, because it only can do it when the engine is just sitting there with NO LOAD, thus not generating a whole lot of heat and friction. One you apply a load, things quickly change, and the engine would most definately seize.
I have seen several engines seize, usually it is rather silent and the engine quickly loses power, stops, and you can not turn the engine over. The engines seize simply because metal expands when it gets hot, and the added friction of running without oil quickly makes the piston too big to move freely in the cylinder. It often scores the cylinder while it is going out. Heads may also warp as they are often made of aluminum, and have different thermal properties than iron engine block they often sit on, so the head often warps faster than the engine block.
Bottom line is if you ever see your oil pressure light come on, stop driving immediately and find our why you have no oil pressure. It can be because the oil level is low, or a blockage in the oil line somewhere.
Heat becomes your enemy. With no oil, the friction increases causing heat buildup. The heat causes expansion and leads to the engine seizing as previously mentioned. They don’t always go quietly though. If you have kept the rpms up nicely, sometimes a rod or piston will break before it completely seizes up. When this happens, you get some loud banging and holes will generally appear in the block and the oil pan.
My local race track does does a “go `til they blow” thing every year where they drain the oil and water from a couple of old beaters and then block the accelerators to the floor. It’s generally pretty boring, but once in a while one will do something somewhat spectacular as mentioned above.
One of the tricks that the additive companies used in their “drain the oil” demonstrations had to do with the water they sprayed on the the engine. They would claim that this proved that the additive would cling to the metal even with the water being sprayed on the engine. What was really happening is the water was keeping the engine cool. A cool engine means no expansion and no seizing.
Although I have never “blown” an engine due to no oil, as a racer I have had several engines break rods or pistons. It gets quite exciting when one knocks a hole in the block and/or oil pan and deposits 3 to 4 gallons of water along with 7 quarts of under your tires. The worst I had took 9 other cars with me. :eek: