Friday, February 9th, 2024 AT 1:01 PM
Hello, our 10-year-old 100,000 mile engine is still running because we have been doing 3 month or 3,000 mile synthetic oil changes at Walmart and because Walmart makes us wait too long we did the last synthetic oil change at Crystal River Fast Lube and Repair which put the next oil change on the sticker at 4 months or 5,000 miles, because of our frequent oil changes our engine didn't seize up yet but it's running poorly, specifically when I open the hood while it is idling in the Park position the engine shakes just the engine shakes but not the whole car and when I stick my ear to the top of the intake manifold while it is idling then it makes a growling sound or noise and when I stick my ear in front of the engine on top of the serpentine belt and between the intake and exhaust variable valve timing solenoids right above the spinning intake and exhaust variable valve timing actuators or variable valve timing sprockets then the growling sound or growling noise gets a little bit louder but I don't hear the growling sound or noise at a distance I just hear it when I stick my ear to the engine with the hood open, the oil level is a pint over full so it doesn't have a low oil level problem and it has synthetic oil in it, what are we facing? Is our engine going to seize up even though we do frequent synthetic oil changes on it? Is it a timing chain problem which just causes poor performance but doesn't lead to engine failure? I will download a bing images obtained photo of a similar engine which has been removed from a car just to show you the top engine parts and what the top engine parts look like, anyway I read on AI or artificial intelligence after inquiring what causes an engine to seize up and AI or artificial intelligence told me that the most common cause of engine seizure is insufficient lubrication but we have plenty of synthetic oil in it and we change it often so there is no chance that our variable valve timing solenoid screens will obstruct engine oil flow to the timing chain, thank you in advance for answering our question and here is the downloaded photo of a removed similar engine on a crate.