I would imagine that most engines have e some degree of metal parables left in them when manufactured. Usually the get caught on the oil screen and are removed at the first 600 mile service. I know of a 1098 which had very low miles and one previous owner. The second owner, a fiend of the 1st owner, was horrified to find 2 piston circles when he did an oil change. He stripped it down and of course found nothing wrong. The engine would have self destructed pretty quickly if even one circle had come out. At a later date the 3rd owner found parts of a gear stopper return spring at an oil change. Stripped it down and found nothing wrong. Makes you wonder.
STOP!!! I cant stand the thought of this! Good job Ducati dont make heart surgeons! Seriously though, we are 2023 now, and those old oily engine factories are all history. Maybe on 0.0001% something dodgy was left inside an engine. I still cant believe all those broken lumps that came out of NBB engine!! Mind blowing/Engine blowing
we have oil sample and analysis on the boat engines every service. the bearing metal is specific and would show on a oil analysis if there was an issue so long as you had the previous one to compare against. Samples are done from oil in the sump not what has been drained or the dregs of the sump Ive seen engines pulled and rebuilt that where fine because a surveyor didn't like what the oil sample said, usually if there is a anomaly if not serious, advice is to retest after 50Hours
I did the 1st oil change on my brand new 1198 after a week or so as I was bored and had some oil. I found lots of wee bits of metal in that too. I was assured that that was normal. To be fair it went thru its 1st service a snells with no comment and I did further oil changes and found nowt after.
Is a piston circle a piston ring? I'd be worried finding that at an oil change! At my Desmo service, the dealer found a 1" piece of metal in the sump, which after inspection didn't seem to have come from anywhere (didn't look like part of anything the technician recognised). Odd but I did ask them to go through the engine as much as poss to check. I guess if the bike goes pop I'll know they didn't find the problem! That said, IU';ve put another 2k miles on since then and all good.
No, it's one of 2 circlips that retain the gudgeon pin (wrist pin) which holds the piston to the connecting rod.[
I had a 959 engine go pop at 1900 miles! The replacement has done 2500 and all is good so guess you do get a bad one now and again!
About 6000 miles ago I found a very small roll pin attached to the sump plug of My MV F4 750 No idea where it came from
Nope. It was replaced under warranty and they never gave a cause of the failure. My uneducated opinion is that a con rod snapped and went through the cases. It was quite a mess!
If you have concerns then get an oil analysis done. There's lots of people can do it. The company I worked for offered every customer that service. With some engines costing over a million a rebuild is considerably cheaper than a new engine. An analysis can pinpoint exactly what is wearing and how badly.
I found this interesting. You can’t make solid conclusions from a single sample per manufacturer, but interesting all the same.
A company called Finning will do an oil analysis for you if you can take a sample. It looks at the state of the oil and any traces of various metals. It then gives you those values and the safe ranges, and explains what various metals (or combination of metals) could be a sign of if the values are high. I've used them a few times now for cars as part of pre-purchase, it's quite reassuring. Think it was only about £30, but takes a few days to get the results back from the lab.
I had what looked exactly like machining swarf in one of my oil changes once and that’s what I assumed it was. No problems since.
