If you've been following the FI forum you will know that several TT'ed 350Z's have blown their engines. I don't want to get into that discussion here since ther is a separate forum for that. What I would like to know though is, has anyone blown a totally stock 350Z engine or ever heard of such a thing?

I certainly haven't. I believe the VQ35 engine is virtually bomb proof when run as designed and engineered by Nissan.

 

I did, with an oil consumption problem though

 

I know of one but it was probably an overrev during downshift.

 

I think i have thesame problem as far as oil consumption. how much oil are you losing per 1000miles?

 

You guys with oil consumption problems....

As stated above... How much oil do you burn through, and how often do you burn through it?

Also... what are your driving tendencies?(General Shift RPM's, lots of street racing, etc?).

Did you follow the factory recommended break-in procedures? How about recommended maintenance?(Oil change, oil filter, air filter)

I'd like to try to see if we can track down a cause for oil consumption, and the associated engine problems... and correlate them with certain driver-specific behaviors and/or maintenance deficiencies. If not, there's always a chance that you guys might have recieved a factory-defective engine with low compression and defective internals.

 

Hmm, well it got worse and worse actually..started out it would be completely drained by 3000 miles and went down from there. Before the engine blew I had only gone 1000 miles after an oil change.

I bought my coupe used but it was a female owner before me who babied the car so I imagine she did the easy break in. I drive aggressive and with the new engine I will drive that way from day one, I dont believe it taking it easy for the first 1200 miles. Actually the car is being broken on on the dyno.

I will say this.. a good number of people who had oil consumption had usually switched to synthetic one time or another (including me) this is going by people I've talked to with the same problem..not just speculation.

 

I switched to synthetic at 6K and have been using it since then now at 32k and no oil consumption problems.

 

this engine probably burns thru oil quickly because of how lean it runs with all the emissions crap in the ECU trying to make good emissions ratings

I burn thru oil quick too

 

I htink that under extreme conditions you will definelty burn oil, I remember seeing the 350ZEVO race car and at the beginning of the race for a few laps it would smoke like crazy and they said they overfill the oil on purpose becuase it would burn through oil quickly.

That being said going through 5 quarts of oil in 1000 miles is excessive but I would think you would have seen clouds of smoke out the rear.

 

I'm not saying every person who switches to synthetic will have oil consumption, I am saying every person I talked to that had oil consumption with maybe one or two exceptions did switch to synthetic some time. I really dont know what would cause it and for a while I thought I could figure it out but I gave up on that.

Before the engine blew I was seeing clouds of smoke, especially on a cold start then revving, as time went on it just got worse and worse.

 

I'm at 4500 miles this oil change and haven't burned any yet. I switched to synthetic at 3750 miles. I plan to change oil every 5k miles. The color of the oil still is very amber. I plan to send in a sample for testing the first couple of oil changes.

I remember researching oil issues at bobistheoilguy.com and there were several mentions from VQ35 owners who were burning a lot of oil.