Ok, I have swapped out the oil pump with a known good one. We also manually fed oil into the oil pump and then went ahead and primed it how people suggested by cranking with no plugs.

I still don't see oil to the head, but should we start the motor up? Is it not running high enough RPMs from the starter to really get the pressure up top?

When I swapped oil pumps, I put the other oil pump + pickup on the oil pan outside of the car, it fits in there 100% with about 1/4 or 1/8" of room to the bottom of the pan.

The oil pickup was clean and oil would flow through it fine when dumping oil in it outside of the car.

Any suggestions, should we give it a go and try to start it for a few seconds so its at like 1k rpm and see if it starts fully puming it?

 

Ok we have oil to the head finally.
We swapped pumps, primed it, then cranked it over and over with the plugs out. We never saw oil get to the head and we searched and found a post about a guy who cranked his for 4 minutes total, with breaks inbetween of course, and also never got pressure up. So he started it up and it was fine.
So we said screw it and started it up, valve cover off. Oil was shooting out onto the intake manifold so we were good.

The only problem is the oil light will not go off now.

We know oil is up there now, I can see it shooting everywhere around with the oil cap off at idle. And everything is oiled up in the head nicely coated.

Any ideas on the oil light still being on?

 

Try changing out the oil pressure sensor. Its about $5.

 

l

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by PhatBoy5015 &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">Try changing out the oil pressure sensor. Its about $5.</TD></TR></TABLE>
I guess thats a good idea since the shop hot tanked the block with the sensor on it still

 

If that oil light is staying on, you may have damaged the bearings enough to have very low oil pressure when the car is running--although that is kind of doubtful because the stock honda oil pressure lights come on at something like 4-7 psi--After I rebuilt my motor--and currently, I get about 75 psi cold idle, after warm up I get anywhere from 25-45 psi at hot idle. Get a known good working gauge on there before you start the car again. In that dry oil pan, it almost looked like very small bearing particles--was that just the camera or were there particles in the pan? If you have below 7 psi (cold idle) on a fresh motor--you have problems in the lower end. Also, like mentioned before the stock oil pressure sensor could have taken a **** on you. How does the car sound? Any tapping or unusual vibrations?

 

Yes your right.

the oil pan look like a oil pas from a dead motor.

full of engine bearing debris.

 

The engine had a complete rebuild. Pistons/Ring, Rods, Bearings, Honing (sp). The block also had to be notched on the IM and EXH side of the block at the bottom of the cylinder walls to make clearance for the rods. The girdle also had to be milled out to make clearance for the rods.
The debris in the oil pan is aluminum flaking. Most likely from all the motor work that was done. Once we take the pan to work and really get it clean all that will mostly be gone, but it was all probally just kinda stuck in places. It is very fine flakes also at that.
And I thought bearing debris would be a brass/copper or something color.

Also the engine sounds 100% fine, the only thing is the timing belt is just alittle loose. There is no signs of any tapping, no rough sounds or anything.

Main bearings is worse case scenario (sp) in our case. I am going to guess its a gasket, oil pickup gasket is what we are thinking. We will just drop the pan, let it drip dry very well, clean both surfaces as good as possible and see what happens.