Midnightrider wrote on 08/02/09 at 11:16:00:This is my first post. About an hour ago I bought an 03 Savage with 4,700 on the clock. This is not making me feel good about my new purchase. What do you think happened other than the obvious? Was she low on oil, cam chain broke, etc?
Do not worry about your 03 too much.
This disaster was of my own making. When I put in the larger piston last spring, I noticed that the new piston weighed a bit less than the original. I tried to balance this by machining a weight to fit inside the wrist pin to make the weight the same as the old one.
I found half of this weight in the wreckage of the engine, indicating that the balancing weight I had constructed had come loose and worked it's way out the end of the wrist pin. It had then fallen onto the flywheel and found it's way to in between the flywheel and the rotating counterbalancer device. The next time the counterbalancer swung around about 3800 RPM, the piece was between it and the flywheel.
Since it couldn't compress, something had to give. The front of the engine was torn away at the bearing housings of the counterbalancer and the balancer and housing chunk were what I felt go under the rear wheel. Two quarts of oil blew out in an instant and it was all over for this engine. I have to take guilt for an expirement gone wrong.
Do not worry about any unmodified engine. This sort of thing can only happen when a large chunk of metal falls between two moving parts.
Something nearly impossible unless you are as big a fool as me to think you can out engineer the factory.
Phelonius