How much is too much - metal shavings in oil pan?

[crshowers]

Sorry I missed some of the additional replies. 

Lots of good questions being asked. I did not remove the valve cover. But still can I will do a bit more looking. The rebuild did not involve any milling. But there was some assembly work done with the valve cover off. This was done after the oil pan was on. I did check the bearings for slop and they all felt to be the same. I will post an update tomorrow.

Thanks to all 

[SteveJ]

I would still remove the valve cover. If you find signs of scratching on the cam, you can figure it also happened to the bearings on the crank.

[grannyknot]

12 hours ago, crshowers said:

Grannyknot I am feeling pretty confident that you nailed my problem. I removed the bolt and the end of the bolt is worn down at an angle. The angle part is shiny. See 2nd pic.(2.5 mag.) Pic below shows the size of shavings compared to a dime. There were no shavings in the oil pump screen. 

 

 

I also cut the oil filter open and found no shavings.

Do you think if I grind the bolt down by a 1/4" I will be good to go?

Don't guess, remove the valve cover, install that forward bolt holding the thermo housing on, make sure there is space between the end of the bolt and the back of the chain guide.

@Captain Obvious is right about the chain guide being steel, I'm mixing up BMW chain guides with Nissan guides. If the shavings you found in the pan are aluminum then they came from somewhere else and as mentioned above could have just been sitting in an oil passage and got blown out into the pan on first start up.

 

[crshowers]

For those following this thread. Below are the follow-up activities that I took.

- Re-checked the shavings, the largest shaving was non-ferrous. some of the smaller pieces were steel.

- Removed the valve cover and re-inserted the thermostat housing bolt. It had no affect on the chain guard. Chain guard shows no signs of scraping. See pic. 2.5 mag

- Did a more in depth look at the bearing play by placing each cylinder in a non-compression state. The feel test seem to be the same for each bearing.

- Did a detailed inspection (strong lighting) of the top of the head and camshaft. Found no particles or scoring of any kind.

As some of you have mentioned I am feeling the same. There must have been shavings from the re-build. I recall, after the rebuild, when we first fired the motor and set timing & tuning. I did an other oil change & filter. I did not inspect the filter (should have).

Putting things back together and will do another oil change & filter inspection in 100 or so miles.

Again thanks for all the support.

 

 

 

[Captain Obvious]

Good. Keep an eye on it.  Here's to hoping the whole thing was a non-problem and just a couple chips left over from the head shave and gasket scraping.