Have any of you guys heard of a 5.0 oil pump having an outright failure????
Heres the deal..
Got the car from a friend of mine as an incomplete project.
Engine was built by a shop.
Engine was set in the car, and never hooked all the way up.
I got the car, pulled the upper end apart to look at it, change some stuff, etc.
About a month ago I used a drill and primed the oil system. Everything seemed fine.
Somewhere along the line I managed to drop the oil pump drive into the pan(the retainer is missing, i think it stuck to the distributor when I test fit it and fell out at the wrong time).
So I pulled the pan, got the drive, and put it back in.

Well, I been trying to get the car running the past few days. Getting the electrical sorted out on top of the car having a standalone means alot of cranking with nothing to show for it.
Tonight I got the car to fire a bit. I ran it maybe a minute total.

Thinking that I never looked at the oil pressure gauge when the car was running, and that it doesnt work while cranking(electric gauge), I got curious and disconnected the feedline to the blower. ITS DRY. Thank God I dont have the blower belt on yet.

So I pull the dizzy and try to prime the oil system. Nothing. If I turn the oil pump drive by hand, I might get a tiny amount of resistance(like its bound up) and then it breaks free and free spins. If I put the drill on it it does absolutely nothing.

Its almost like there is a sheared drive pin or one of the gears in the pump just totally broke. But that seems highly unlikely to me. Every time I seen an oil pump "fail" it was just wore out and had excessive gear to body clearance.

Like I say, the driveshaft is fine too. So its not a busted shaft.

Anyone hear of such a thing??????

 

Thanks for the words Adam..LOL..
If the car didnt fire up tonight, Yeah, I would be feeling so defeated. But the few moments of the X cam pounding through the flows offset alot of my disappointment.
Did yall take apart the pump that came out of his motor to see what was wrong with it?

And yep, I guess instead of tuning the car tomorrow after work I get to jack it back up, drop the subframe and pull the pan.. again... I plan on taking the pump apart and checkin it out. I just didnt know if anyone ever seen one fail like this before and what it was...

I wouldnt be suprised to see it be sabotage.... Apparantly over time there became some bad blood between my friend and the shop that built the motor. I dont know the whole story but it ended up being one of those "Just put the thing together and give it back" kind of things after a while.
Well, when I pulled the valve covers off I found a few nuts laying in the top of the heads... When I pulled the cam I found instead of an Anderson cam, it had a stock 95 5.0GT cam..When I installed the new cam I found the pushrods were WAAY too short, even for a stock cam. I ended up with .300" longer pushrods than what they put in it. When I pulled the pan off the first time I was suprised to find that it wasnt full of nuts and bolts too.

 

yea same ehre, to me it sounded like they installed a plug wrong somewhere.

 

Well....
After having it apart, I can now say Im not quite sure WHAT it was.
A friend came over tonight and we got started about 7:30 or so, maybe 8. Got the car jacked up, dropped the K member(woo hoo....), pulled the pan, pulled the pump....
Pump seemed fine.
I installed a FMS high volume pump and FMS heavy duty shaft.

Notice in the first post I mention that hte little retainer ring was missing from the shaft that was in the car? Now I am wondering if its possible that without the retainer that the shaft walked up into the distributor and therefore just wasnt engaging the pump? The drive unit I have is magnetic so it wasnt helping matters.
What I do know, is the new drive shaft is the same length as the old one, yet is sitting about 1/2" lower in the block than the old one was yesterday.
So once again, Im thinkin that without the retainer clip the shaft just managed to walk up into the distributor too far, or maybe when I put it in the second time it was just sitting on top of the hex and not actually in the pump.

What I can tell you is that the fucker works now. Before I put the pan on I dropped the dizzy in and cranked the engine by hand while my friend had his finger on the pump shaft, and he said it turned. Pulled the dizzy back out, buttoned up the pan and filled with oil. I left the feed line for the Vortech disconnected when I primed it on the drill, and HOLY HELL. Oil shot out with enough force to hit the corner where the wall meets the ceiling and just hose down that whole area. Thats like a straight line on a 45 degree angle for about 12 feet. If there was no wall there I bet it would have shot the oil 30' by the time it touched the ground.
Now the car needs some SERIOUS tuning. But atleast it has pressure.

 

Anyone wanna buy an oil pump?