John Mayfield

I'm new to this forum, so I hope someone can help with my problem. I have a 2005 Civic (D17A1 engine) that needed a replacement engine. After a long and painful dealings with an engine manufacturer (long story), I've ended up with a 2001 engine to rebuild. Per Carfax's, the engine only had 79,000 miles on it when the car was scraped for an accident. The looks of the engine makes me believe that's about right. So, since we had the engine on the bench, we replaced the rings and main and rod bearings. The crank was clean and measured with in specs, so we didn't grind the crank. The bearings we used were Honda bearings. We also replaced the oil pump with a Mellings oil pump. The rods and mains plastigage between 0.001" and 0.0015" clearance.We also replaced the orifice in the head. We also added an electric oil pressure gauge which we have checked against 3 other mechanical gauges. When we start the engine (10W30 oil) cold (room temp) we get near 100psi oil pressure at 2000rpm and over 50psi at idle . However, after driving the car for 20minutes or so, the idle oil pressure will drop to less than 5psi. We've checked the oil pressure with different oil weights up to 50 weight just to see the effects and we get about the same results. This is driving me nuts.

One other strange occurrence, we've had two Fel-Pro oil pan gaskets fail since we've rebuild the engine. Hope someone can help with this problem. I miss my Honda.

Slumpertcivic

Don’t unscrew it with engine running, but maybe as soon and oil pressure starts to drop, open hood, loosen the oil cap, then shutdown the engine and immediately take cap off. Is the entire valve area flooded to the cap?

More than once I have found plugs left over in the oil drain holes resulting in almost all the engine oil pooling up inside the valves.

Slumpertcivic

And maybe smear hondabond on both sides of the next felpro gasket? Does not take much to warp that oil pan, that’s why Honda specifies intergrated washers in their design, no clue what felpro uses.