‘News’ Category
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 few people lately have had some questions regarding doing work on some part of their drive train so we thought we would share some more information on this. The chassis and drive train design on C5 and C6 Corvettes is actually pretty cool. It takes several hours of work but if you have access to a lift, by unhooking some wiring and removing a few bolts, the entire running gear of the car can be be separated from the body. As you can see in the picture above, this is a car we worked on recently and had to remove the drive train. The engine, front suspension, brakes, torque tube, transmission, and rear suspension can all come out as one assembly. It can then be broken down into individual pieces if only one part needs to be replaced. This also gives you great access to the individual parts if you are doing performance upgrades or engine work as everything is out in the open and no longer in the car.
Here is another picture that shows the drive train assembly a little closer. The red bracing bars on the rear differential were an aftermarket add on this vehicle had and stock Corvettes will not have that on them.
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