I own a 2008 Miata, purchased new, now with a little over 61,000 miles. It’s been carefully maintained throughout its life and over the last 18 months has been driven very sparingly (1,900 miles total). Last year I began having problems shifting gears, and about a month ago, decided to have a new clutch installed. To get this done, I brought the car to a repair shop that had worked on it in the past.
The clutch was replaced and according to the shop’s work invoice description of what they had done, the major clutch components replaced were the clutch assembly, flywheel, slave cylinder and rear main seal.
Immediately after I picked up my repaired car, I drove to a tire retailer, less than a mile away and had all four tires replaced. During that short drive, I noticed a great deal of engine roughness, roughness that was nowhere evident when I delivered the car to the repair shop a week before. I didn’t think too much of it at that moment though, figuring (wrongly, as it turned out) that it might have something to do with the new clutch and a need to drive the car a while to break it in.
At the tire shop, I watched the entire 4-tire replacement operation from just inside the shop bay door. To perform the replacement, the shop technicians picked my car up simultaneously at the recommended lift points, two on the frame immediately to the rear of the front tire wells and axle and two frame lift points immediate to the front of the rear axle and tire wells. My car was off the ground no more than three feet the entire time the tires were being replaced and that entire operation took less than 30 minutes to complete.
After replacing my tires, I left the tire shop and resumed my drive home, normally what would have been a 10-mile trip. I got less than five miles down the road however, when my engine exploded.
AAA brought the car back to my initial repair shop where I was told that my engine failed because there wasn’t a drop of oil in the crankcase and because of this, most if not all of my main and piston bearings had disintegrated. I was also told that the shop couldn’t/wouldn’t handle any of the fixes that would be needed to get my car back in running shape. They did suggest an alternate repair shop, close by, that could make whatever repairs were needed.
That’s where the car is now, about to have the entire engine replaced.
When this second shop had a chance to look over the damage, they made two observations which I think are significant. First, there is no indication of any oil leakage whatsoever on the car’s underside. Second, that underside is just about the cleanest these mechanics have ever seen.
If as it appears, there was no oil whatsoever in the car when I took delivery of it from the first repair shop after they’d replaced the clutch, where did the oil go? There was oil in it when the car was dropped off to this first shop. Including the trip from my home to drop the car off, I’d driven it without incident around town the week before, easily between 50 and 100 miles.
There is no evidence of oil leakage in my garage and this garage is the only place the car has been stored since its last oil change. The work done by the tire shop did not cause the problem either. Nothing they did, including lifting the car off the ground, was done anywhere near the underside of the car. That’s supported by what the second shop said about the condition of the car’s underside. And to the best of my knowledge, oil doesn’t simply evaporate away into thin air, particularly from a sealed environment like an engine sump.
So if all this is true, then where did all the oil go between drop-off and pickup? One explanation is that one of my first shop’s mechanics, for whatever reason, as they were replacing my clutch, drained my oil and forgot to fill it back up when they were finish.
Is there any other explanation someone can come up with (other than me screwing up royally)?
