Hi all - new to the board and need some help. I picked up an 08' Spyder GS SM5 from a guy a couple of weeks ago at a very cheap price. He was the original owner, and it had around 8000 miles on it. He took it in for regular maintenance back in January to his local dealer, and they replaced all the tires, brakes, hoses and the oil pump.
He picked it up and rode about 1/2 mile before the oil line to the oil cooler flew off, oil sprayed everywhere and he shut it down. He had it towed back to the dealership and their diagnosis to him was "You have metal shavings in the oil - the motor is shot - you need a new one - $10K."
He sold it to me cheap as a project, and I'm now digging into it. I won't get into the fact that if it happened to me, I would have gone right back and make all sorts of accusations against them.
Anyway - fast forward to now - I've been troubleshooting and here's what I've done (in order) and found:
- Topped off the oil, reattached the hose, checked in the spark plug holes to see what I could see (everything in there looked good - nice and clean - no scoring or damage).
- Started the engine, and almost immediately the hose blew off.
- Drained out the oil, pulled the oil tank and oil cooler. Tank was fine - Oil cooler was almost completely blocked. Knowing it was probably toast, I put some water through it and all that came out for a long time was sludge.
- Non magnetic shavings in the oil - very fine, almost powder like.
- Ordered a new (used oil cooler), but in the mean time as a test, I reinstalled the oil tank, bypassed the oil cooler, refilled the oil and added some oil flush/cleaner.
- Fired it up and it idles great - no issues. Ran it for about 10 minutes, shut it down, drained the oil and had a lot of crud in there (including the powder looking non-magnetic stuff).
- Refilled the oil, fired it up, and it idled great again for a few minutes (until it warmed up) and then started to make a little bit of a strange noise so I shut it down.
Research told me that maybe the clutch plates were bad and since some portions of that are not magnetic, I pulled the clutch cover and all of the disks out. This is where it gets interesting. The clutch plates were shot - pictures attached, but they are in rough shape. There was a lot of debris in there, all along the outer perimeter of the clutch housing.
I've ordered a socket so that I can pull the wheel and housing off - want to see what's going on behind there before I decide what's up, but I'm thinking that the clutch basically was shot, debris started going through the oil and clogged the oil cooler. I also want to see the condition of the new oil pump.
I'm suspecting that the dealer did not actually replace the oil pump - if they had, wouldn't they have had to pull the clutch housing off and also pull the plates? Seems like they would have told the PO about the clutch and replaced things at that time.
Anyway - just posting to see what people think, gather opinions and take it from there. I'm hoping the motor is still good and this crud hasn't ruined the whole thing.
I'm also very open to opinions if I'm heading down the wrong path.
2008 GS SM5 - Engine, oil pump, & clutch Troubles - Need Advice?
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