I'd replace the pick up tube completely, re-install the now-removed parts, add oil and check OP at a hot idle--should hold no less than 25 PSI. The question then becomes was any potential killer damage done while the OP was restricted.

For your sake I hope not but be prepared either way.

 

I cleaned out the tube and let it soak in some Berryman's for a while to get all the crud dissolved so that it looks really clean at this point. I also filled the pan with diesel and sloshed it around a bit and then followed that with a brake cleaner spray-down. After running a brush through the drain hole and scraping the sump, I'm not getting any appreciable amount of solids, so I think it's as clean as it's going to get. While I was trying to re-install it, though, I discovered that in the process of turning the bolt to loose the bracket, the bracket got a little bent. Just to guard against the bending and rebending causing a crack, I decided to wait until I can scoot over to the Ford parts department on Monday morning to pick up a new pickup.

If the pickup isn't the problem, then I either have a clogged passage in the engine somewhere or my mains are worn. Either of those things mean I'm going to have to pull the lump, so it isn't really going to hurt anything to put it back together and try it nor will I lose that much time in the grand scheme of things. I had a UOA done right after I first had the problem and it's not showing any contamination, cutting the filter open didn't reveal any metal at all, and the bores for the cams and balance shaft were aged but not thrashed. And other than the whole low-oil pressure thing, it has never sounded as quiet or idled so smooth with the new cams, balance shaft, and timing setup. So at least I'm starting from a decent point if I do need to rebuild the thing.

 

If the mains were toast, the oil pressure wouldn't drop at higher RPMs, I wouldn't think.

And your balance shaft journals look really good, so I don't think any real damage was done, but you never know.

 

A new pickup tube may help but the underlying problem will still be there, your rod and main bearings are toast from oil starvation caused by a sludged up motor. You maybe able to pull the motor and replace or have the crank turned and install new bearings but you will have to make sure everything is cleaned up.

I had it happen to a 400m I rebuilt but I overheated it and the oil pressure acted the same way, when I removed the bearings they where all down to copper but what saved me was the motor was clean and I used a Melling high volume pump. I had my 10/10 crank turned to 20/20 and put another 100K on the motor.

Denny

 

The only reason I'm optimistic about this particular engine is the journals in the head for the balance shaft.

On the other hand, there is some pretty bad pitting on the cam lobes...

 

I'm not sure if that's enough of a blockage to cause what I'm seeing, but so far it's the only thing that I've seen is wrong and it's got to be fixed regardless. I figure it's worth trying it, but if it doesn't work, all I've really lost is about 7 quarts of oil. Worst case, it's a couple hundred bucks at the machine shop to grind the crank and line hone the block and heads and a couple hundred bucks worth of gaskets and bearings. Heck, it would give me a chance to take care of the busted manifold stud that I found while I was crawling around the oil pan.

When the oil pressure dropped initially, I dumped the oil into a fresh pan and sent some off for a UOA. The oil had about 2000 miles on it, give or take, and the results looked like this:

 

I picked up my NOS oil pickup tube from the dealer yesterday afternoon, but my wife and daughter had a blow-up last night so about 15 minutes after I arrived at the shop after dinner to get to work, I had to turn around and go back home to mediate the dispute. In that 15 minutes, however, I got the tube-to-pump bolts properly torqued and the tube-to-main-cap bracket bolt tightened, but I was going for the torque wrench when the phone rang. Funny story: on Saturday night when I was trying to put the bent pickup in, I managed to drop one of the smaller bolts into the pan and I spent about 30-45 minutes trying to find it and extract it. Last night, I decided to learn from my mistakes and I put a rag in the pan to catch any falling bolts and keep them from rolling about. Naturally, I was able to get all three bolts installed without dropping any!

That's a long way to go to say that there's no resolution yet. But another funny story came up. Apparently my dad ran in to some guy who he says was a Ford mechanic for 30 years. I assume that means that this guy worked as a dealer technician, but this is a Dad story so it's heavy on details just not the important ones. At any rate, he bent this poor guy's ear about my problem - and again, I don't know what symptoms other than "low oil pressure" he told him about - and this guy said that he's 100% convinced that my engine is just shot and it's not even worth rebuilding. According to this third-party account, he claimed that the V10 was a junk motor that had all sorts of top-end lubrication problems and they were constantly replacing engines. Also, I wasn't given any detail to back this up, but he also said that Jasper's rebuilt V10s were also junk.

I'm a bit skeptical of this account since the Internet is typically full of tales of woe about problematic things. 99-03 Honda transmissions, 1.6 short nose crank wobbles, IMS bearing failures, ACD troubles, and sludged up Camry motors stories are so prevalent that if that were a representative sample, you'd think that just walking past one in a parking lot would give you herpes or something. I've heard plenty of problems with spark plugs popping out, some stories of followers failing and fouling the valvetrain, exhaust manifold studs breaking, and motors eating COPs like candy. But I've never really heard a lot of talk about the 2v 6.8 being fatally flawed or short-lived.

Tonight I'm hoping that the fragile truce I brokered last night will hold and I can get everything put back together and tested out. As a contingency, I've got my Rock Auto cart filled with gasket sets and other rebuild parts as well as some leads on rebuilt heads if the bores are too far out of spec. Either way, I should know where things stand soon!

 

Got everything back together tonight. That 3-stage tightening sequence for the 18 (!) oil pan bolts is a load of hooey, though. Whew! I left the gauge on, filled it with oil, and started it up. Right away, it was making about 90psi where before it was 70 or 80. Ambient temperature was also about 15 degrees warmer. After letting it warm up, I can hold the engine at 3,500RPM and the oil pressure rises and holds until I let the butterflies snap shut. At this point, I'm calling it fixed; root cause: clogged oil pickup.

 

Congratulations on the successful repair!

Now the question is how or why did the original pick up tube become clogged?

 

Before I bought the truck two years ago, it averaged about 5.5k miles per annum, so my guess is that the oil wasn't changed very frequently in terms of the number of days that it sat in there. More than likely that was also combined with a lot of short trips where it wasn't really bought up to temperature and held there. I think that caused the oil to get a little corrosive which caused the pitting on the cam lobes and generated the sludge that got sucked up into the strainer. Overall, there really wasn't much sludge in this engine, given its mileage. I didn't get in to the block at all, but probing in to the oil passages in the cam and balance shaft bores, there was no residue of anything but clean motor oil. The pan wasn't filled with jelly and the underside of the rotating assembly looked clean as well.

 

The real test will be when you drive it under a load and up to operating temps, can you use your oil pressure gauge when driving so you see what it's doing.

One other easy test to do when it's been driven and warmed up is to remove the oil fill cap put it in gear and power brake it and see if and oil vapor comes out hole. If vapor comes out then you are getting blow by past the rings and that could be the source of the sludge buildup.

Denny

 

Yep, since the computer doesn't know or care about the oil switch signal beyond turning on the light on the cluster, I was able to drive around with the gauge sitting on the cowl of the truck. It passed that test with flying colors. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a bit of vapor, but I'll have to test that. My insolubles came out at .4% on the Blackstone report and that seems healthy, but like you said, it's easy enough to check that with the Mk I Eyeball.