cracked oil pan
 

Well this is a new one for me. Never seen or heard of this happening.. just walked out of work to a puddle of oil under my truck. Found this.

http://i1194.photobucket.com/albums/...ps8286f4f5.jpg

On my way to try to TIG this back together. I've never TIG welded overhead before. Should be interesting.

How the heck would that crack? New one to me too. Good luck welding it back together.

youre going to have a fire if you weld that pan on the engine. maybe purge the crank case with co2 or nitrogen or something to displace any oxygen from the residual oil. might work with a fumoto valve or something with the same threads. and even then it would be too risky for me.

Man you just cant win lately. I have seen diesel tanks welded on alot with no problem. They either put a vacuum on them or co2.

x2^^^^^^^^ Your just going to have to start living right Travis, LOL

Edit: Good time to pull the engine and rebuild it!

DONE! TIG welding over head SUCKS!!!!!

Edit: all I did was drain the oil, weld it, and put a couple gallons of the old oil back in it to check for leaks. Drained the oil back out to hopefully get any little bits of metal out, dump a few gallons of old oil back in it and let it drain again to make sure everything is good inside. Fill with new oil and new filter. Driving down the road now.

http://i1194.photobucket.com/albums/...pse31957a0.jpg

Looks like you did a good job!

I've never seen one crack like that either.

I'm not sure why it cracked like that. My best guess would be that there is a dent in the bottom of my pan and it caused the crack. I've seen so many dented oil pans that were much worse than mine though and they haven't cracked..

I saw one like that.It was a LONG time ago.It was an f superduty roll back owned by a salvaage yard...those guys could ruin a bb with a rubber hammer. It was fun to replace the oil pan. I never figured out why it did that,I just fugured they did something stupid to cause that.

In the first pic it looks like a scratch in the pan like something could have hit it

That's a new one! I'm glad it sealed up okay for you. Hopefully it doesn't crack any further. Way back when I worked on the farm, whenever we would repair something that was cracked in a continuous line on a flat surface like that we would drill a small hole at either end of the crack. The theory is that drilling that hole stops the crack from continuing even after the repair is done. Hopefully you don't have any issues with it. It sure would be nice if someone would make a 2 piece replacement oil pan for these things that could be installed with the engine in the truck.

Just a thought here... any abnormal vibration in the truck lately? I'm wondering about the possibility of a bottom end problem causing higher than normal vibration leading to the crack. That's a pretty strange place for it to crack, IMO...

I was thinking :-huh about your fix for the crack, just wondering if it would help to add a formed piece of metal over the welded area then weld the outer edges all around. I thought of this before I read Nates post. I actually know nothing about welding but thought I would throw this out there. Good luck with the fix so you don't have to pull the engine :-X22

The only reason I didn't drill holes at the ends of the crack was because I didn't want any metal shavings in the pan. I did carry the welds out past the ends of the cracks to hopefully keep them from continuing.

I bet adding a piece of sheet metal over that area would help also, but I wont bother for now. I want to see if it's going to hold like this or if the cracks continue. Curiosity mostly.

Chase, no extra vibrations. The engine is running great, but when I first saw that puddle of oil and that crack my first thought was what tried to escape the bottom end. Lol.