I recently bought a used tractor and came to find very shortly after the machine arrived here, that it had a blown engine, a blown engine for the most simplistic of reasons. When you go to change your oil, you open up the drain in the bottom, drain the oil out, spin a new filter on and go to fill that engine back up with oil again. And in the case of this machine, the most simplistic of things happened. That owner, when he went and filled the machine back up with oil, took one of these containers with the foil seal on the top of it, punched his thumb into here. And would you guess where that foil ended up?
Couple weeks ago, we started sharing how we've been buying some tractors off of auctions lately because of the record demand that we're seeing for equipment right now. I shared that this one machine right here, I thought had a bad battery. We're sitting and turning the key and the thing wasn't quite kicking off, but after actually getting it into the shop here, we're learning that this thing has got a blown engine. So going to cost me a little bit of money here on this one, a little bit of a surprise coming off an auction, right? Somebody had probably realized they had an issue here and decided to find a new home for that machine. And unfortunately, that home seems to be me. So what we found when we got this machine into the shop was a little bit more complicated than just the battery that I kind of suspected here might be bad.
In fact, the number one cylinder in the engine was locked up and not turning at all. Now we're suspecting, once we get into the bottom here, we're going to find you a broken cam shaft or a spun bearing down to the lower side of the engine. We have not dropped the bottom out of it yet. We're probably not going to go through that work, because we're going to be replacing this with a new engine. But what we found when we got in here was floating around the top of the engine and more than likely around the bottom as well are these little pieces of foil. These are the foil caps that you're going to find on the top of a bottle of oil, right? When you go to change the oil in this engine, you're going to have your valve cover sitting up here on top with this big cover on the top that you're going to unscrew.
Now, most of us are going to go and take that bottle of foil and more often than not just push our thumb through it in order to break it open. And what probably happened here was while this prior owner is refilling this thing with oil, those little bits of foil didn't stay attached to the bottle. In fact, they tore off and were dumped down into the top of the engine. And right here they are, we found these little bits floating around. Now, they can stay in the top of the engine or they can work their way down through the oil passages to get down to the bottom side of the engine, and they're going to do all kinds of harm down there. They're going to plug up the different oil passages, not allowing the engine to cool properly, to lubricate properly and do all kinds of trouble.
You might ask why these things didn't get caught in the oil filter. They could probably get there eventually, but as large as what they are, there's a lot of different screens and places for them to get hung up on the inside of the engines. As innocent as this seems, I think we all probably open bottles this way, right? It's easy to take your thumbnail and punch right down through the top and pour that oil in. But goodness, I would've never guessed the damage that can cause. When you walk through the aisle at a dealership that has all the oils that can go into your machine, you're usually going to find funnels. Now, interestingly enough, when you look at these funnels, the cheapest of cheap ones have nothing in the bottom of them in order to keep some of that debris from running through the funnel and down into your engine. Now, some of these here are going to have a little bit of a larger screen in the bottom here that's going to catch big pieces, but even that right there is going to let some stuff go by.
We do have some down here on the shelf. We're going to have finer screens in the bottom, screens that are so small, that they're going to restrict the flow of oil as it goes down and fills up your engine. But you may want to consider if you're filling up your equipment regularly to invest in a funnel like this, that has some dirt collection in the top of it, right? Be concerned, not just for the oils going into your engine, but the ones that going into your transmission too, right? If you're dumping that debris in down there, it can do some harm. Interestingly enough, while I was going through and looking for bottles over here that had that foil seal on it, the more premium oils that we stock, the OEM stuff tends not... For what we've got here on the shelf, not to have those foil seals.
When you crank these caps off, you're going to break the plastic off there. And that's what opens up the top of it. The less expensive ones though, the more economy priced oils are the ones where you had that foil seal on the top. Now I don't know if that's a difference in who the bottling companies are, or if it's simply the manufacturer being aware of this and actually choosing to have their bottles made that way, who knows. But one way or the other, when you walk through this aisle, kind of with that foil seal thing in mind, it's interesting to pick up on the differences. So that's a little bit of failure analysis on that B2920. I know when I'm now dumping bottles of oil into the top of my equipment, I'm certainly going to be more careful with those little foil seals. That's for certain.
