June 10th, 2015 | 
Author: A customer had his 2006 Z06 towed to our shop with what he thought was a blown head gasket. The outcome was actually much worse. Upon closer inspection looking under the car we noticed that part of the engine block had pushed out and the motor had way worse damage. We took out the oil pan plug and got some oil, but mostly coolant –not good. Taking the heads off the engine it looked like the piston had disintegrated and all that was remaining was the wrist pin. The chamber in the head looked like hamburger too.
This car only has 11,000 miles on it so we were a bit baffled as to why it would have such a catastrophic failure. Upon doing some research we found out this is actually a known problem in the Z06. It turns out the valve guides can go bad prematurely and cause a valve to stick at high rpm, which then causes the piston to smash into it and lots of fail to happen. You can see in the pictures below the cylinder walls were even cracked and pushed out when this happened.
We are still weighing some repair options with the owner but if you own a Z06 you might want to have this checked out before something happens, because it’s not a cheap repair.
The car in question. 2006 Z06 with only 11,000 miles.
Draining the oil but getting mostly coolant.
This engine has hollow sodium filled valves. This is the valve that stuck and then broke off in the cylinder causing the damage.
The piston broke into many pieces and all that’s left is the wrist pin. Notice the cracked cylinder walls too.
Here are the few pieces of piston we have found so far.
The inside of the cylinder head chamber got tore up pretty bad too.
We recently had a customer bring us a C5 Corvette that two different local repair shops had told them had a seized motor. Replacing the entire engine would have been really expensive both in parts and labor. We had a sneaking suspicion it was something else when the customer brought it in though. We decided to remove the torque tube instead of the engine and see if that was the problem and sure enough it was. The torque tube on a Corvette is basically a housing that contains the drive shaft. The drive shaft rides on a set of bearings inside the torque tube. Somehow the inner shaft that spins had become dislodged and pushed backwards inside the torque tube. This caused the bearings and the inner shaft to seize up and stop turning. Because of the torque tube being seized it prevented the engine from being able to turn over. You can see the damage to the inner shaft in the pics below and the hole in the front of the torque tube housing where the inner shaft and bearing should go. The shaft basically pushed back into this hole and locked up in there. We were able to simply swap out the customers torque tube and get them back on the road saving thousands over doing an engine swap.
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Pictures from the 2013 Vettefest Show and Shine. Click on any of the pics below for a larger view.
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A customer brought us his C5 Corvette with some unfortunate collision damage. The damage included a cracked front bumper, broken passenger side rocker panel, a hole in the rear bumper, damage to the passenger door, and scratches or chips on every other panel on the vehicle. We tore this car apart quite a bit during the repair process and fixed the broken rocker panel and some minor damage to the quarter panel as well. We replaced the passenger door, front bumper, and rear bumper. We then went over the rest of the car and repaired all the scratches, rock chips, and other defects before sending the car to the paint shop for a complete repaint. The car was repainted in the factory silver and a set of custom grey racing stripes were laid out to give it a different look. The rims were also refinished to give them a like new appearance. The end result is a C5 that now looks good as new and will stand out nicely with the custom paint.
The pictures below show the repair process from when we received the car until it was completed:
