Bad Engine Bearing

Well at about 19,000 miles , engine got bad noise. Stopped truck immediately. Mechanic said metal shavings in oil. Bad bearing. It is under warranty , parts ordered by dealership. This sounds like a bad engine, and i dont trust it. Should i trade it away after fixed?

 

Sorry for the misfortune. Please post the details here.

https://www.tundras.com/threads/3-4-i-force-engine-failures.121107/

I wouldn’t trust it being rebuilt after a catastrophic failure assuming you plan to keep it beyond the warranty period.

 

I would hope they would get a new short block from Toyota rather than repair the original. Toyota does supply new short blocks (no long blocks) for many of their engines, hopefully they will have these available for yours.

Dan

 

I hate to be negative here, but I've had a bad experience with a new engine being rebuilt by a dealership "mechanic".

I had a vehicle that was producing light smoke and it would not pass emissions. The piston ring gaps were aligned on at least one cylinder and the engine had to be torn apart. The experience got bad from there. I got the vehicle back and shortly after, it spun a rod bearing causing the engine to sound like a jack hammer. It went back again to be torn apart. I got the vehicle back and the engine leaked oil everywhere and at that point, I was done with it. I basically had to give the vehicle away after that because I could not sell it with a clear conscience telling the buyer it was reliable.

I would trade it back to them and strong arm them on trade in value. Or, take it to another dealership and tell them nothing about what happened and let it become their problem.

 

Get rid of it, buy something else.

Gen 3 Tundra doesn’t seem to live up to the reputation of a Toyota for far too many buyers.

 

I’m wondering if and when Toyota will address this publicly. I think Facebook generally has a lot more users of tundra owners on the various pages and I’ve got screenshots of somewhere approaching 20 failed engines on the various pages. It’s odd because so many make it to 20-40k miles before the issue pops up. Many newer trucks don’t have anywhere near that many miles yet.

 

I wish we knew the accurate number of failures. I don’t know how many Tundras have been produced since 2022 but It would be helpful to know the percent failure of total units built. Then compare it to Ford’s cam phaser failures and GM’s engine and trans failure percentage. It just sucks to have any failures at all but that is not reality.

I know Toyota will stand behind these failures but I really wish they put complete new long block motors in them. Metal shaving circulating through a motor increases the risk of future failures. Im sure they do their best to clean all the oil passages during rebuild but it doesn’t take long for the metal shavings to damage other bearings prior to the total failure and eventual short block rebuild. Hope you are reading this Toyota.

 

Thank you

 

Here is another one on Instagram a guy who works on a Toyota dealership and is working on a 2023 tundra with a bad main bearing.

 

Every day there is another thread about a Gen 3 issue/problem.
I plan to keep my 2014 for several more years, but unless Toyota gets its shit together, I'll be looking elsewhere for my next pickup....

Good luck to you @zorro and welcome to the forum.
I'd buy a used 2021 before buying a new Gen 3..

 

Closer screenshot

 

The other side

 

Sorry to hear that OP. Seems like we made it through turbo failures, and now onto total engine and transmission failures.

Do you mind sharing your build date? The ones posted here seemed to happen on similar build dates. I can't speak for the instagram and facebook posts though

 

At mileages this low a 10K OCI vs a 5K OCI shouldn’t be making a difference. That kind of service interval difference should show results for long term owners past say 150K miles, maybe sooner on a turbo engine but not in under 50K miles. Plus a difference in OCI shouldn’t manifest in spun main bearings as the first sign of trouble. An engine that is neglected with overly long OCI’s will probably start consuming oil before anything else as the oil control ring and other piston rings coke up and no longer make a good seal.

Same for 0W-20 vs 5W-20, or 0W-30 etc. A look at oil film shear strength between those weights as well as viscosity at operating temps, they’re not as drastically different as we all might think. Maybe past 100K miles you would see a difference, probably with indifferent maintenance, but not under 50K.

If those assumptions are wrong, and the engine is on the bleeding edge of reliability vs catastrophic failure due to oil breakdown due to 5K vs 10K OCI, or a slight difference in oil film shear strength or viscosity; then the engine has no place in a mass production vehicle.

Being a truck engine, and not a high strung race engine I have to assume there is plenty of safety margin built in to allow for somewhat varied oil viscosity, and additive package breakdown over a 10K OCI.

Spun main bearings are usually either bad bearings that are materially out of spec, or an oiling issue where oil is not reaching the bearing surface. There is a slim possibility that the engine is so unbalanced that the crankshaft at one end is flexing and hammering the dog piss out of the bearing (usually the very front or rear most bearing). If it’s that out of balance though I can’t imagine the driver wouldn’t notice it, but maybe the motor mounts soak up vibrations so well a guy might not.

I still suspect a bad batch of main bearings, or flawed block castings with obstructed oil passages.

Either way some pretty unacceptable QC/QA these days.

 

I have in my time opened quite a few engines - mostly machines built pre-85 thanks to ever improving techniques meaning it's not something that one usually has to concern oneself with nowadays, motorcycles being the most common due to the much higher stress factors involved.

The thing I find crazy about that pic isn't so much the damaged shell but the fact that the other three look as one would expect for a low mileage engine. Usually when you open up an engine if you are going to see one wrecked shell you'll be seeing all wrecked shells. Oil starvation across the board wasn't too uncommon back then but to my eye that looks suspiciously like you have a tolerance issue. Either way, with the way stuff is machined today if you have either oil or tolerance issues then it's almost certain that so do x number of other blocks or cranks that were produced in that same run

 

Yes, repeatability is both the beauty and the curse of modern manufacturing. Also, why these forums are valuable.

 

Maybe get CarShield! ;-) Or better yet one of those discounted 10-year Toyota plans here on the forum.

 

Word in the field from my source is that the failures stem from debris from manufacturing. Lodged debris frees up and then restricts the oil passage. If debris is lodged, it can free up at any time, essentially creating a ticking time bomb. The bright side, if there have been 500 failures (probably not) it’s still only a half of a percent. But who knows the actual statistics.

 

And, hopefully, in most cases it should get filtered out before it can plug anything up.

 

Toyota recalled the first run of 5.7 engines with the bad camshaft castings after 20 failures which I think mostly failed out of the gate. I’m curious how the handling of this scenario would relate. An engine no matter how it failed, or at what mileage it fails is still a safety concern while driving. How many is recall worthy I guess is my question.

 

problem is, the others one are not better . I thought the same thing when the gen 3 first came out and the turbo thing was going . So I said the same thing, ok time to look elsewhere.

the ford didn’t even make it through the test drive without breaking down.

grass isn’t always greener. It came down to i trust Toyota to fix shit and stand behind things way more than the others

 

Agreed. Our dodge/jeep/ram shop is always full of major repairs, whereas at Toyota, it’s mostly maintenance at 3x the capacity. Our techs that came from chevy were amazed how many fewer problems Toyotas have. But they still have their issues.

 

Would you consider buying another 3rd gen. Tundra?

 

I noticed that too. The other bearings look totally normal. Not what you would see if all the oil was breaking down, or all the bearings were defective or parts were dimensionally incorrect.

 

I am guessing Toyota would step up on this for you should it occur. There are enough of these reports that it is concerning to me, but I’ve developed an admitted bias against the 3rd Gen and how Toyota has handled early problems when trucks have been sidelined.

As pointed out by others if this were considered as a percentage of trucks in service, it’s not a huge problem for the vast majority of owners.

 

Know owners well of our local Toyota dealership and trust me, Toyota isn’t much better with their current trucks. We can all cherry pick bad stories of every brand.

 

Might have had trash on that bearing if rest were good.

 

Would anyone be surprised if the reason for so much shoddy product could be as simple as the manufacturers no longer giving a monkeys about ICE vehicles? They know their days are numbered, tooling up for electric will make a huge dent in their bottom line, from their point of view better to get the electric running properly and hope to lean on the glory days past for repeat business than put valuable R&D into a vehicle that will be obsolete in ten years (if hype is to be believed). Obviously you have to put enough in to keep up with the hordes baying for more electronic whizz-bangs but do you really want to go all in, after all if you want to be number 1 you don't need to be perfect you just need to be slightly better than the competition.
People tend to forget fairly quickly short term hiccups, you only have to look at the Datsun example - a reasonable looking stable, for the time, reliable, for the time, but you only had to sneeze on them and the blasted things would rust through. Sort out the rust issues, brush the Datsun name under the carpet and call yourself Nissan and hey presto...

 

So this goes back to the wonderful debate of how soon should one change the oil for the first time...500 miles? 1k? 2k? Etc?
Would this even help is the next question...