Engine ran without oil, possible fix?

[Tatraplan]

My neighbour has two 6.2 diesels. On one of them an oil
cooler line broke and all oil was pumped out. He didn't
notice this until the engine failed. When it's cooled down
it's not even possible to turn the crank with a 2 meter
long extension rod. The engine ran a few minutes without
oil before it collapsed.

Has anyone experienced the same thing? My question
is if anything at all could be reused from this engine and
if it's possible to repair it?

It will probably at least need a new crank (or grinding) +
bearings, pistons + cylinder bore. I guess the cam + it's
bearings would be lost without oil too, but could the heads
be OK after a few minutes without oil.?

/Robert

[john8662]

A no-oil situation is one of the hardest things on an engine, besides getting really really hot.

The good news is that most likely the engine will be rebuildable with the above mentioned tasks.

Take carefull notice when dis-assembling the engine to look for anything that took excessive wear due to no oil

The crankshaft will most likely need to be turned and all the bearings replaced. The thing to look closely into here is to look for "spun" bearings, where the bearing had seized and will force the two halves to spin in the bore. This is a potentially bad situation, because this will require the block to be align-bored to correct, which isn't something that most machine shops do, but is a very common machining process given the correct equipment. This will be your concern mainly on the main bearing journals, rods won't be as big of an issue because they get "resized" on the big end anyways, or can easily be replaced.

The heads will most likely need to be re-conditioned at the time of dis-assembly, but probably didn't sustain any damage, you'll be checking guides and renewing o-rings and wipers (stem seals) at that time anyways.

Replace the lifters at this time.