Hello All,
Following on from my online trek at the AWM I found this article about restarting a motor after it sat for two years... There are some good pictures of the pistons. The article
Corrosion, wear and corrosive wear; the story of lubrication systems in large technology object storage and use is written by David Hallam, David Thurrowgood and Col Ogilvie of the National Museum of Australia
Figures 5 and 6 (shown on page 6 - no pages numbers in article) show our Land Rover. It’s done 3,802 miles since 1958. A thousand of those miles have been done in the museum service. It’s been filled with a standard lubricating oil. The lubricating oil has been changed about every year. Last time it was used, it was used for the royal tour. We were starting a maintenance program on it and we thought “Well, we’ll whack an introscope down and see what’s happened inside it”.
It had sat for about two years.You can see there the corrosion. If we had kicked that engine over, what would have happened?
The piston would have gone up and scraped the corrosion off. What’s corrosion? An oxide. What are oxides used as? Abrasives. What size are they? Very small - small enough to go through the filter. So what you’ll end up with is this very fine abrasive slurry, that won’t be picked up by the filter, rotating round and round inside the system. And that’s exactly what happened with my Volvo. I ended up with this nice abrasive slurry and it went through and it ripped out all of the oil seals and did a whole lot of damage.
In the museum, if we had kick started the Land Rover, the same thing would have happened. Okay, how have we vercome that? We use nothing but inhibited oils, we don’t use any standard lubricating oils in our institution.
The article has colour images and is found at:
Australian War Memorial Accessed 9th August from,
http://www.awm.gov.au/events/confere.../corrosion.pdf
Kind Regards
Lionel