where to start?

[cocheeze]

my friend recently allowed his 1994 corolla to run almost completely dry of oil. he said that the engine all of a sudden got really noisy (about 4x as loud, accompanied by knocking and whirring sounds) and stalled. he restarted it and drove it to the nearest place to get oil, during which it was really noisy, and died a couple more times.

after adding oil, the engine got much quieter, and seems to run alright, however the knocking sound remains and gets much louder as the engine is revved.

the engine always stalls after being revved above 2500 rpms and released, however if he keeps his foot on the gas at 2500 rpms or higher it will continue to run fine without stalling.

he has asked me to come over later this week and give it a look to see if i can figure out what he did to it, however i am a bit unsure even where to begin...

i was hoping that someone here might have a good idea where to start, or even a rough idea what the problem may be. i am familiar with 80s and 90s japanese cars, but not specifically 7th gen corollas.

any ideas/suggestions?

thanks in advance,

casey

[MrGiggles]

Before you do any work to that engine I would remove the oil pan and check the rod bearings for play. If it ran low on oil there's a big chance it spun or scored a bearing resulting in the knocking. If any of them have major problems the motor has to come out and be thoroughly looked over.

[trife96]

^ agreed, more than likely a connecting rod is knocking. You might be able to spend about $350 on a new crank kit with reman crankshaft and oversize bearings and maybe a connecting rod and be ok. But you really can't install the crank kit without removing and disassembling the motor some. Sorry to hear that

[kickfli12]

your best bet would to just get a new motor cause the things trife96 and mrgiggles said are true. it would just be easier to do a swap rather than a rebuild.

[speedy25]

engine swap is your best economic option.

-SP

[cipher93]

This why you check your oil weekly and always keep a spare in the trunk if you run low... as the above have said, the engine is basically toast and needs a bottom end rebuild or outright replacement. Trife's method may work, but for $350-400 you could probably get a replacement motor from a junkyard to swap in, much easier than doing all that work and still running into issues down the road.