This will probably sound incredibly dumb to all of you, but I ran my 94 f150 with a 5.0 on the highway for 150 miles at 75mph with about 13 quarts of oil in the crankcase. Needless to say, my truck is not doing too well. I didn't realize I had so much oil in it. I went to change the oil, and I overflowed my empty 10 quart pan. I now have the correct amount of oil in it, but it's running incredibly weak and it's making a lot of noise. Did I ruin my engine? Is it just a matter of time now? Thanks for reading and thanks for the help!

 

Did you physically put in 13 quarts? Or did you have a head gasket leak that emptied coolant into the crankcase?

 

The correct refill is 6 quarts when changing the filter. Is that what you have in it now?

 

I physically put in that much. I have no oil pressure now.

 

Yes, I have 6 quarts in now.

 

When I first started the truck after adding all the oil, it smoked very heavily from the exhaust and then ran fine. I then traveled 150 miles on the highway. When I got off the highway, it was very noisy and weak. That's when I decided to change the oil to see how much I really had in. I overflowed my 10qt oil pan and roughly 3 more quarts flowed out. I changed the filter and then I filled it with 6 quarts. I think it's even noisier and weaker now. So I let it sit all night, and started it this morning. Still noisy, weak, and no pressure. However, it does idle.

 

If you run an engine where it's absurdly overfilled, it's actually like running it without oil. The crankshaft threshes the too-high oil into a bubbly foam which the oil pump's pickup inhales and rams through the system. Those bubbles contain air, which has no appreciable lubricating properties in an internal combustion engine - so basically you're pumping air through the engine's oil passages. (If you want to see this phenomenon in action, go find one of those Lucas Oil Treatment demonstrators that has two columns of gears that you can crank. On the Lucas Oil Treatment sample, if you crank the gears fast enough you can see the frothing start and migrate up the gear column - thus demonstrating why you do *not* want to use that crap in your engine!)

My vote is to start shopping for another engine. At least 302s are cheap.


Edit: Here's a video someone else did with one of those Lucas demonstrators to illustrate the point. No connection to either party.

 

How hard is an engine swap? I have pretty descent knowledge of engine functions, but I've never done anything like that.

 

How hard is an engine swap? I have pretty descent knowledge of engine functions, but I've never done anything like that.

 

Curious...Why did you put 13 qts of oil in it?

 

Short answer: Because I'm lazy

Long answer: The truck has been burning oil. A lot of oil. So much oil that I've had to add about 1 quart every two weeks. It's been going on for so long that I stopped checking the dipstick, I've just been adding oil based on the pressure. Then I got lazy and just put in too much. Before I knew it, I lost track. I guess I just made a stupid mistake and got lazy. Definitely regretting it now. Also, I didn't know that the crank case could hold so much. I figured if it got too full it would just overflow. When it never overflowed, I just thought it was burning oil even worse; therefore, I just added more oil without checking the dipstick. Now I'm the dipstick.

 

At least you learned from it. I was wondering how you were able to get all that oil in there.

 

Here's the thing, your oil pressure gauge is just effectively a light bulb. If you have at least 7 PSI of oil, it puts the gauge right to the middle. If you have less than 7 PSI, it reads 0.

If you were regularly running your truck low enough on oil so the gauge read nothing, then filling it up with oil - you already destroyed your engine. Overfilling it and letting it deal with a foamy oil mess was just the straw that broke the camel's back.

Plus, burning a quart every two weeks, the engine junk anyways, regardless of what you did to it.