Talk Morgan Forums Morgan Sports Cars Morgan Three Wheeler & Super 3 Oil change nightmare

When doing an oil change today I thought I saw a little metal particle in the old oil. Wanted to be sure, so I opened the old oil filter and rolled out the filtering paper. In the whole outside part of the filter I saw small metal particles. With a little magnet I went over and collected most of this debris. Smeared it all together to get an idea how much it was. I drove with this oil and filter about 4000km.
Where does it comes from and what can be the cause ?

Was this your first oil change and filter change? I know S&S recommends an oil change aftr about the first 50 miles, usually to remove any bits of random manufacturing reminants that may be left over, but this does some like a lot. Any other work you have had done to the car?

Check the needle bearing of the front exhaust camshaft.

Total mileage on this car / engine is 40.000 km.
This was the 6th oil change.

Oh Dear, that's not good and not normal....

It does seem worrying Lauren's even though I imagine your early car now has a significant mileage. I remember being in a syndicate running a 1970's Cessna 172 with Lycoming O-320 engine. The model year used a variant of this engine with T bucket cam followers that had a history of early failure. Consequently at each oil change the filter was split open. Unsurprisingly this eventually revealed the onset of cam follower failure well before any danger of power loss. I believe an old oil sample was sent to the lab for analysis as well to back up the findings. Apparently this can even reveal what part of engine the particles are shed from.

Not suggesting it's the same with your engine Lauren's and would have expected a small amount of white metal from plain bearings being trapped by filter but that would not be magnetic.

I wrote my Thesis for the Institute of Road Transport examinations on "Lubrication contamination and contamination analysis" It was the top thesis submitted that year -1984 - for which I was awarded two Diplomas, one at local level and one International level. It is surprising how much information can be gained by burning and analysing a speck of used lubricant..

I hope you can get some good advise on these fragments, quite worrying that they are ferric.
Good luck.

Think about getting an analysis done. That would identify the metal and point to the source. There are companies that do oil analysis.

Millers Oils in the UK can do that