Update: Is my engine a paperweight?

So a while back I posted about my '92 Jetta that severly flooded due to a fried ECU. While trying to diagnose the no-start issue, I flooded it worse. There was likely at least a litre or more of gas in the oil (when I drained it there was WAY more than 4 L that drained out).

Now it has sat for a couple weeks, and I put in a new ECU and it started up. But there's no oil pressure. Like not even enough to run out the port where the sending unit goes. I didn't let it run long, and no load or RPM to speak of. Maybe 30 seconds or so.

Did my pump just get washed right out and now it won't prime, or is my bottom end toasted? The hydro cam followers were making a hell of a racket, but no noticeable bottom end type knocks that I could hear.

I'm going to pull the distributor tonight and try to prime the pump.

It's a 2.0 ABA block with a digifant 8v head. It was running just beautifully before the ECU issue.

What's GRM's best guess on what I'll find. Any suggestions?

I don't know about your engine specifically, but I don't think an engine needs to 'prime' like a pump does. What I mean is that it won't continue to suck air indefinitely if not primed. Priming just fills everything up with oil. It's better called prelubing. If your engine was cranking with that much gas in it, prelubing is a great idea, followed by another oil change (or two) to get rid of all of the fuel.

You may not have hurt it, seriously. You may have hurt it a bit, only one way to find out. Figure out how to prelube it, run the car for a minute or two, change the oil, repeat., start the car and see what the oil pressure is.

Did you put oil back in after draining it out?

Brye

If you had some varnish/sludge build up the gas just washed it down to the sump and gacked up the oil pump pick up. Drop the sump, give it and the oil pump a good cleaning. Put it back together - cross fingers, but I think it will be ok.

silly question to ask.. but also an obvious one to start at when it comes to finding out what happened to the oilpressure

If you eventually drop the sump like mad_machine suggested, might as well pull a main and rod cap to check the bearing. That'd be the first thing to go w/ thinned out oil or no oil pressure.

oldtin wrote: If you had some varnish/sludge build up the gas just washed it down to the sump and gacked up the oil pump pick up. Drop the sump, give it and the oil pump a good cleaning. Put it back together - cross fingers, but I think it will be ok.

Yeah, that occurred to me too.

So my first suspicion was actually correct, I think. I built my device for spinning the oil pump with a drill. It spun easily with no pressure on my mechanical gauge I hooked up under the hood, for several seconds, like maybe close to a minute, then WHAM! It primed and built pressure up to 60 psi! I think the pump, which is tired and old just got completely flushed dry with the amount of gas that was in it and had a hard time re-priming.

I put the distributor back in, and started it. Built 70psi cold (like other vw's I've had) and the lifters slowly began to quiet down. Once it got fully up to temp and the fan had cycled a couple times the lifters were quiet, and it had about 25 psi hot at 900 rpm. Seems all is well.

It seems rare that I run into a best-case scenario, so I'm just gonna run with this one!

congrats doc, you must be livin right