TEA BTR and Thompson Motorsports The story of my 2015-2016 engine build
08-04-2016, 08:40 PM
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TEA BTR and Thompson Motorsports The story of my 2015-2016 engine build
Early July of 2015 I had a lifter fail in my 40k mile ls6 from an 03 z06. The car had seen around 15 track days and who knows what kind of abuse before I bought it. So I decided it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get it overhauled. I live in the Milwaukee metropolitan area so there are numerous reasonable engine shops between here and Chicago so I called a number of them trying to get written quotes with no real success. A number of places said I could bring it in and they could get it built but I don’t really have a high tolerance for spending thousands of dollars with someone who can’t go through the trouble of quoting me a solid price with specific parts in writing.
I started looking around the internet and eventually found Thompson Motorsports. They seem to have a good reputation and my buddy knew a couple people making power on their motors so it seemed like a place to try. They have really good service, and seemed to respond to emails within a couple hours. I got an opportunity to talk to Miles quite a few times in the order process, he seems like a good guy. They got me a written quote without issue.
I looked around a bit and TEA and AI seemed to be the 2 solid choices for 243 cnc’ing. I could not get AI on the phone and they were slow to respond to email. Gregg at TEA was great, they allowed me to have BTR ship springs straight to them and install them on my cnced heads. I just didn’t know enough about what I needed to work with AI. Gregg was excellent to work with and provided me with a great final product which met my needs nicely. I wanted to keep the stock light weight valves and they got everything working for me, a stage 1 cnc and cut the heads .060 to get the chambers down to 58-59cc.
BTR had already spec’ed me a cam for my needs and that would work with his springs and stay stable at over 7k rpm so I wanted to go that way as Brian spent well over an hour talking to me over a couple calls to figure out exactly what I was doing and helping me plan how much to cut the heads to get everything right. It was a real pleasure working with him. It is neat to talk to someone who knows so much and is willing to share it, especially before I spent a penny with him.
Thompson found a core that had the ls2 dampener spacing I requested and got my motor built. It was pretty much their default gen3 5.7 which I added their in house H-beams with arp 2000 rod bolts as I knew i wanted to spin around 7k rpm and figured it was worth the $200. It used a gm crank and diamond pistons. I bought the oil pump from them to get their 1 year warranty, and because I intended to buy one either way. My engine build is a weekend warrior type setup. NA with no power adders, 6ish track days a year and street driven maybe 100 days a year. I run mostly at Road America on street tires and 2:40-2:42 last year with the stock motor so not fast but not slow.
When asking about a blueprint sheet I was told they could get me one but that it would cost $250. I was struggling to get everything together, learn all I needed to to make some reasonable LS build decisions, and get the car up and running in some reasonable time frame so I just missed this red flag. Here is the direct response I got relative to asking for a blueprint sheet: “For a blueprint sheet outlining all main and rod clerances, deck heights, ring gaps ect you we have a documented blueprint option for $250 with all clearances outlined.”
So I get the short block and heads and get everything together and put in. Get the car street tuned so it will run well enough to drive and break in and then dynoed last year. Everything looked good. The stock manifold is choking it a bit but made 438/409 wheel, so pretty reasonable for a cam with under .6 lift and huc lobes. The whole goal was to put something together that would last 25k miles with about 5k of them on track, not make max horsepower.
I changed the oil, as I always do, at the beginning of the season this year to get any water and whatnot out of it due to the car sitting all winter. When i cut the filter I found what i considered way too much metal. I have linked it below.
So of course at this point I am not happy. This isn’t the original oil so I wasn’t expecting any major metal in it. I talked to thompson about it and they told me to run it for a while and see if it cleans up. I am no motor builder so what do I know, but I start paying very close attention to the car.
It had smelled like oil on and off, it never had an issues with leaking, everything sealed up fine. So I decided to run it on the freeway a little and try and see what was up. The first thing i noticed was on decel there was a large cloud of very blue and oil smelling smoke that would sort of come around the car if I decelerated from high rpm to a stop. Then, with a friend in the car, we found that the car would blow big clouds during acceleration in a freeway pull. Couldn’t smell it but it looked like the same oil smoke, clouding up the road for maybe 100 yards and I also felt the car pull timing. The manifold was covered and shiny with oil but there was between 1 teaspoon and 1 tablespoon of oil in the catch can and the tube from the front of the passenger side valve cover to the throttle body was totally dry.
So I knew at that point it was junk and had to get torn down so I could hunt for a smoking gun. Before I took it apart I did compression, leak down, and ran an endoscope into every cylinder. There was very clearly oil on the top of a couple cylinders. The #2 plug was slightly oily. Compression tested 180-190 which I feel is low for a car with 8.5:1 dcr and 11.2:1 scr but it was cold so who knows. The leakdown was at 12-15%. It was pretty close cylinder to cylinder. I test it with a leakdown tester with 2 pressure gauges then do the math to find leakdown. I feel this is too high but they were close enough it didn’t set off any alarms. I haven’t personally tested a forged piston engine before so figured it could be normal. Then i ran an endoscope in and found pretty serious bore scoring. I will link the videos below.
So at this point I assumed that the bottom end was to blame. I had already opened a line of communication to Kyle and he gave me some ideas of things to look at/for. I also spoke to Gregg again who assured me nothing leaves the shop without guides being checked. So there isn’t any realistic way the heads are the issue. Kyle was always friendly and never told me I couldn’t send the motor in but also never told me to expect it would be covered till we got to this:
“With any mechanical issue it will be there all the time, If the rings are not sealing it will not seal all the time not some of the time. It is true that you would have increased crank case pressure with RPM but if you have an issue it would be huffing smoke at idle and heavy smoke under accel out the breathers. You would also have erratic compression readouts. You do not have either. I recommend you look elsewhere for the issue. If you would like to send the motor back for inspection you can do that but I hate to see you waste your time and money paying shipping and r&r as I am relatively certain you do not have an issue with the motor. We deal with a lot of these motors and have see broken pistons and rings but not a single one with symptoms even close to yours.”
So this gives me the feeling that I need this shortblock and heads checked out by a 3rd party to identify what the actual issue is so the finger pointing can be stopped, and I can find out who is at fault be it the heads or block or myself in assembly. Once I send the short block off assembled anything could be done to it and I could be told and charged anything. I was certain at this point, specifically in my case, a warranty on a rebuilt engine has no value what-so-ever. So I found someone to take on the case that is an expert engine builder with experience with LS builds and specifically said he was willing and interested in blueprinting my existing short block and heads to try and find a smoking gun.
So upon examination the following things came to light. The heads are good, he said they looked really good, and all the guides test ok. So no smoking gun there.
The piston skirts and bores are pretty seriously scored and 1 of the rod bearings looks funky. My new builder looked into this further and got the sheet from diamond for the custom pistons which is below. Per the diamond sheet the pistons need .0045 piston to wall clearance and are built for 3.902 bores. The bores measure at 3.8995 which is .0025 under the diamond spec bore size. The required location(piston fit point) to measure the diamond piston diameter is 90 degrees from the pin and .700” down from the bottom ring land. The pistons measured in at 3.8973 - 3.8974. Which means the piston to bore clearance was .0021 on a 2816 forged piston in a motor built to be used, at least part time, on a road race track with the clear expectation for 25k of combined street/track life. So I was not asking for a 100k street motor build. Mind you this motor never made it to the race track so never even saw serious use. My new builder clearly stated his belief is that this is my smoking gun. It caused the scuffed up bores which caused the oil consumption. But he went on checking everything.
So the crank was checked for straightness and was .0007 bent, and straightened to .0002 with no machining. It was cut by Thompson .010 and measured flat. Spec on -.010 is 2.5488-2.5493 for the mains which measured in at:
2.5491
2.5491
2.5488
2.5492
2.5491
Rod journal -.010 = 2.0890-2.0900
2.0901
2.0902
2.0899
2.0899
2.0900
2.0901
2.0899
2.0903
Some of this paragraph is straight from my builder and over my head. Upon measuring the block and rod big ends my builder discovered that the main bearings and the rod bearings had signs of metal transfer on the backs and oil film wedge breakage. In addition; he mentioned that the main housing bores (when torqued to spec) were over the high tolerance of the factory specification by as much as .001 and the rod housing bores were over the high end of their tolerance as well. He informed me that the housing bore spec exist for proper bearing / component alignment as well as proper bearing crush. He went on to say, not having enough bearing crush; can cause the bearing to spin or move. There is evidence of the bearing moving as cap and back sides of the bearings showed metal transfer and heat. He told me that a moving bearing can also cause a break in the hydrodynamic wedge formed between the crank journal and bearing surface. When this wedge is broken there's no protection of components and metal transfer happens.
The out of bore was measured at the corners to check the deck cut. I did specifically request .010 out of the hole. The measurements came out to .015 and .010 on one side and .015 and .016 on the other.
So where does that leave me? New ls1 block, new k1 crank and rods, new wiseco pistons. The cam and lifters are still good. The heads all checked ok and are reassembled and ready to go back on. I spoke to Kyle again and always he was very nice, but when confronted with the numbers he explained to me how they build motors to their specs. That’s great and all, till the specs lead to my motor showing serious signs of failure by 700 miles. He did offer to look at it for me, but as I don’t trust his specs anymore, for obvious and what I feel are reasonable reasons. I now have a $3400 coffee table in the works.
In reality the $3400 for the short block plus the $500 in gaskets and breakin fluids and $500+ in an oil cooler isn’t even the worst part. Nor is the time spent waiting for the motor and installing it. I lost my whole 2016 track season as by the time I get my new motor broken in, and the tune checked on the dyno it will be October, which is really what sucks!
I realize a bunch of people like Thompson and the people there do seem nice and easily accessible. I won’t be doing business with them again and will recommend my LS friends stay far away as they don’t seem to do things to the level I expect when I spend my money. I would rather spend a few grand more and know someone spent some time getting everything just right the first time. Specifically something like a motor which isn’t trivial to swap out. As I haven’t seen many people unhappy with Thompson I figured I would share this for people to consider before they buy, as I spent some good money to get hard numbers.
I have recommended TEA and BTR to numerous people already as they really did an excellent job in customer service AND delivered me parts that are to my personal, and admittedly high, standards. I am very appreciative for their work and will continue to recommend their services.
links to pics/vids
https://drive.google.com/drive/folde...EUzX0RUMzdkQjg
https://drive.google.com/drive/folde...jB1bXBpelQ5TG8
I started looking around the internet and eventually found Thompson Motorsports. They seem to have a good reputation and my buddy knew a couple people making power on their motors so it seemed like a place to try. They have really good service, and seemed to respond to emails within a couple hours. I got an opportunity to talk to Miles quite a few times in the order process, he seems like a good guy. They got me a written quote without issue.
I looked around a bit and TEA and AI seemed to be the 2 solid choices for 243 cnc’ing. I could not get AI on the phone and they were slow to respond to email. Gregg at TEA was great, they allowed me to have BTR ship springs straight to them and install them on my cnced heads. I just didn’t know enough about what I needed to work with AI. Gregg was excellent to work with and provided me with a great final product which met my needs nicely. I wanted to keep the stock light weight valves and they got everything working for me, a stage 1 cnc and cut the heads .060 to get the chambers down to 58-59cc.
BTR had already spec’ed me a cam for my needs and that would work with his springs and stay stable at over 7k rpm so I wanted to go that way as Brian spent well over an hour talking to me over a couple calls to figure out exactly what I was doing and helping me plan how much to cut the heads to get everything right. It was a real pleasure working with him. It is neat to talk to someone who knows so much and is willing to share it, especially before I spent a penny with him.
Thompson found a core that had the ls2 dampener spacing I requested and got my motor built. It was pretty much their default gen3 5.7 which I added their in house H-beams with arp 2000 rod bolts as I knew i wanted to spin around 7k rpm and figured it was worth the $200. It used a gm crank and diamond pistons. I bought the oil pump from them to get their 1 year warranty, and because I intended to buy one either way. My engine build is a weekend warrior type setup. NA with no power adders, 6ish track days a year and street driven maybe 100 days a year. I run mostly at Road America on street tires and 2:40-2:42 last year with the stock motor so not fast but not slow.
When asking about a blueprint sheet I was told they could get me one but that it would cost $250. I was struggling to get everything together, learn all I needed to to make some reasonable LS build decisions, and get the car up and running in some reasonable time frame so I just missed this red flag. Here is the direct response I got relative to asking for a blueprint sheet: “For a blueprint sheet outlining all main and rod clerances, deck heights, ring gaps ect you we have a documented blueprint option for $250 with all clearances outlined.”
So I get the short block and heads and get everything together and put in. Get the car street tuned so it will run well enough to drive and break in and then dynoed last year. Everything looked good. The stock manifold is choking it a bit but made 438/409 wheel, so pretty reasonable for a cam with under .6 lift and huc lobes. The whole goal was to put something together that would last 25k miles with about 5k of them on track, not make max horsepower.
I changed the oil, as I always do, at the beginning of the season this year to get any water and whatnot out of it due to the car sitting all winter. When i cut the filter I found what i considered way too much metal. I have linked it below.
So of course at this point I am not happy. This isn’t the original oil so I wasn’t expecting any major metal in it. I talked to thompson about it and they told me to run it for a while and see if it cleans up. I am no motor builder so what do I know, but I start paying very close attention to the car.
It had smelled like oil on and off, it never had an issues with leaking, everything sealed up fine. So I decided to run it on the freeway a little and try and see what was up. The first thing i noticed was on decel there was a large cloud of very blue and oil smelling smoke that would sort of come around the car if I decelerated from high rpm to a stop. Then, with a friend in the car, we found that the car would blow big clouds during acceleration in a freeway pull. Couldn’t smell it but it looked like the same oil smoke, clouding up the road for maybe 100 yards and I also felt the car pull timing. The manifold was covered and shiny with oil but there was between 1 teaspoon and 1 tablespoon of oil in the catch can and the tube from the front of the passenger side valve cover to the throttle body was totally dry.
So I knew at that point it was junk and had to get torn down so I could hunt for a smoking gun. Before I took it apart I did compression, leak down, and ran an endoscope into every cylinder. There was very clearly oil on the top of a couple cylinders. The #2 plug was slightly oily. Compression tested 180-190 which I feel is low for a car with 8.5:1 dcr and 11.2:1 scr but it was cold so who knows. The leakdown was at 12-15%. It was pretty close cylinder to cylinder. I test it with a leakdown tester with 2 pressure gauges then do the math to find leakdown. I feel this is too high but they were close enough it didn’t set off any alarms. I haven’t personally tested a forged piston engine before so figured it could be normal. Then i ran an endoscope in and found pretty serious bore scoring. I will link the videos below.
So at this point I assumed that the bottom end was to blame. I had already opened a line of communication to Kyle and he gave me some ideas of things to look at/for. I also spoke to Gregg again who assured me nothing leaves the shop without guides being checked. So there isn’t any realistic way the heads are the issue. Kyle was always friendly and never told me I couldn’t send the motor in but also never told me to expect it would be covered till we got to this:
“With any mechanical issue it will be there all the time, If the rings are not sealing it will not seal all the time not some of the time. It is true that you would have increased crank case pressure with RPM but if you have an issue it would be huffing smoke at idle and heavy smoke under accel out the breathers. You would also have erratic compression readouts. You do not have either. I recommend you look elsewhere for the issue. If you would like to send the motor back for inspection you can do that but I hate to see you waste your time and money paying shipping and r&r as I am relatively certain you do not have an issue with the motor. We deal with a lot of these motors and have see broken pistons and rings but not a single one with symptoms even close to yours.”
So this gives me the feeling that I need this shortblock and heads checked out by a 3rd party to identify what the actual issue is so the finger pointing can be stopped, and I can find out who is at fault be it the heads or block or myself in assembly. Once I send the short block off assembled anything could be done to it and I could be told and charged anything. I was certain at this point, specifically in my case, a warranty on a rebuilt engine has no value what-so-ever. So I found someone to take on the case that is an expert engine builder with experience with LS builds and specifically said he was willing and interested in blueprinting my existing short block and heads to try and find a smoking gun.
So upon examination the following things came to light. The heads are good, he said they looked really good, and all the guides test ok. So no smoking gun there.
The piston skirts and bores are pretty seriously scored and 1 of the rod bearings looks funky. My new builder looked into this further and got the sheet from diamond for the custom pistons which is below. Per the diamond sheet the pistons need .0045 piston to wall clearance and are built for 3.902 bores. The bores measure at 3.8995 which is .0025 under the diamond spec bore size. The required location(piston fit point) to measure the diamond piston diameter is 90 degrees from the pin and .700” down from the bottom ring land. The pistons measured in at 3.8973 - 3.8974. Which means the piston to bore clearance was .0021 on a 2816 forged piston in a motor built to be used, at least part time, on a road race track with the clear expectation for 25k of combined street/track life. So I was not asking for a 100k street motor build. Mind you this motor never made it to the race track so never even saw serious use. My new builder clearly stated his belief is that this is my smoking gun. It caused the scuffed up bores which caused the oil consumption. But he went on checking everything.
So the crank was checked for straightness and was .0007 bent, and straightened to .0002 with no machining. It was cut by Thompson .010 and measured flat. Spec on -.010 is 2.5488-2.5493 for the mains which measured in at:
2.5491
2.5491
2.5488
2.5492
2.5491
Rod journal -.010 = 2.0890-2.0900
2.0901
2.0902
2.0899
2.0899
2.0900
2.0901
2.0899
2.0903
Some of this paragraph is straight from my builder and over my head. Upon measuring the block and rod big ends my builder discovered that the main bearings and the rod bearings had signs of metal transfer on the backs and oil film wedge breakage. In addition; he mentioned that the main housing bores (when torqued to spec) were over the high tolerance of the factory specification by as much as .001 and the rod housing bores were over the high end of their tolerance as well. He informed me that the housing bore spec exist for proper bearing / component alignment as well as proper bearing crush. He went on to say, not having enough bearing crush; can cause the bearing to spin or move. There is evidence of the bearing moving as cap and back sides of the bearings showed metal transfer and heat. He told me that a moving bearing can also cause a break in the hydrodynamic wedge formed between the crank journal and bearing surface. When this wedge is broken there's no protection of components and metal transfer happens.
The out of bore was measured at the corners to check the deck cut. I did specifically request .010 out of the hole. The measurements came out to .015 and .010 on one side and .015 and .016 on the other.
So where does that leave me? New ls1 block, new k1 crank and rods, new wiseco pistons. The cam and lifters are still good. The heads all checked ok and are reassembled and ready to go back on. I spoke to Kyle again and always he was very nice, but when confronted with the numbers he explained to me how they build motors to their specs. That’s great and all, till the specs lead to my motor showing serious signs of failure by 700 miles. He did offer to look at it for me, but as I don’t trust his specs anymore, for obvious and what I feel are reasonable reasons. I now have a $3400 coffee table in the works.
In reality the $3400 for the short block plus the $500 in gaskets and breakin fluids and $500+ in an oil cooler isn’t even the worst part. Nor is the time spent waiting for the motor and installing it. I lost my whole 2016 track season as by the time I get my new motor broken in, and the tune checked on the dyno it will be October, which is really what sucks!
I realize a bunch of people like Thompson and the people there do seem nice and easily accessible. I won’t be doing business with them again and will recommend my LS friends stay far away as they don’t seem to do things to the level I expect when I spend my money. I would rather spend a few grand more and know someone spent some time getting everything just right the first time. Specifically something like a motor which isn’t trivial to swap out. As I haven’t seen many people unhappy with Thompson I figured I would share this for people to consider before they buy, as I spent some good money to get hard numbers.
I have recommended TEA and BTR to numerous people already as they really did an excellent job in customer service AND delivered me parts that are to my personal, and admittedly high, standards. I am very appreciative for their work and will continue to recommend their services.
links to pics/vids
https://drive.google.com/drive/folde...EUzX0RUMzdkQjg
https://drive.google.com/drive/folde...jB1bXBpelQ5TG8
