Hopefully someone might be able to help my neighbour out as he is driving me bonkers with questions about his zetec engine build. He is basically throwing waaay too much money on a silver top 2.0 zetec turbo and has just found out that the oil pump gears have been known to break up over 7500 rpm. I've had a look for him but i can only find uprated billet gears for the later black top engines which aren't interchangeable. Does anyone know a source for uprated gears or is drysumping the only way?

I wouldn't have thought he would want more the 7500rpm on a Turbo anyway. Unless he has very lumpy cams and a well worked head it will not do him any good. Stick to 7500....

Yep...would be very suprised if he gets anywhere near 7500rpm. 6500rpm maybe.

Tell him to stop worrying.

Exactly what i told him but the silly fool won't listen. He says that it will be the weak link and if it lets go all the money he has spent will be wasted.

Some people just won't take sound advice and keep ploughing on whatever you tell them. They ask your advice and when it doesn't co-inside with what they want they don't listen anyway.

I've not heard of this problem (not saying it doesn't exist)...But probably the most common reason for an oil pump failure is not revs, it's surge, and oil temp.....Just tell him to take care with his heat management, maybe consider an oil cooler if he plans to do track work, but for clucks sake giving up under high revs is simply not an issue with a turbo. If he goes down this path for his logic, then you may want to recommend a carbon impregnated block, as I heard once that a zetec block gave up the ghost after a rod went through it at 9k rpm!!!!.

Apparently it's due to the gears in the pump being made out of sintered metal that can come apart at high revs. I don't know how true it is but so far i have only seen one case of it on the net and that was for a blacktop engine.

some info on this on passion ford and there have been a few failures on boosted high power zetecs, the resulting damage is obviously pretty bad if the worst does happen.
the jury is still out on what exactly causes the failure in the first place but both high reving tuned N/A zetecs and big boost are the engines at risk and the only 100% certain solution to guard against failure is a dry sump.
my advice is if not pulling lots of revs or running huge boost then don't worry about it.


interesting thread on passion ford here -> http://passionford.com/forum/general-car-related-discussion/381518-zetec-oil-pump-failures-some-actual-definative-facts-please.html

I've heard about it being a potential problem, but it seemed improbable enough that I ignored it in the build of my silvertop Zetec Turbo engine. I've set the rev limit at 7500 at the moment, and looking at the datalogs I do hit that occasionally, but even on track I'm not bouncing off the limiter all the time.

Turbo engines develop power from a lot lower down than peaky N/A engines with hot cams (assuming you've sized the turbo correctly!), so the need to rev the tits off the thing just isn't as big a requirement.

If he really really wants to do it anyway, a guy called AustenW over on the Westfield forum did a lot of research into things like that when he was building a 400+ bhp zetec a few years ago - I'm pretty sure that oil pump gears came up in that discussion.

Tom