Found gold looking flakes on cylinder walls

[cummmy5.0]

Hello everyone, out of curiosity I pulled my plugs and put a borescope in to see what my pistons and cylinder walls looked like. I unfortunately found what looks like gold flakes which indicates bearing failure. I’m really hoping maybe it’s not, these pictures are from 2 separate cylinders on each side showing the cylinder walls and top of the piston. The car has 70,000 miles and I purchased it with 61,000 since I’ve owned it I’ve taken good care of it and do my oil changes with 5w40 liqui moly every 2,000 miles. I do beat on the car a lot but only drive it once every 1-2 weeks. I would appreciate any insights on what it is and or what I should do from here, I was planning on going fbo e85 very soon which I why I decided to check this in the first place. Also gonna be doing a compression test soon as well. Would love to hear what everyone has to say. Thank you

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[SnowFox]

yeah gold flakes are certainly a typical indicator of bearing failure. But bearing failure isn't necessarily the only thing that causes gold flakes or slivers.

You can pull your oil filter, cut it open and inspect it. Bearing material shouldn't be magnetic (if memory serves) So if you're able to run a magnet over some debris in your filter and it "sticks", it's probably something else, potentially benign potentially not.

Optimistically thinking I've seen other people in other car forums find "gold" flakes, and panic (that's fine, motivates people to get to the bottom of it) and a fair amount of times it was something else. (At least a few times it was a combination of the LED boroscope lights, the honey color oil, and the material making it look gold when it wasn't)

But the first thing I would do is drain my oil, cut my filter just so I can get my fingers on it touch it feel it see how it behaves with a magnet.

 

[Snakebyte]

Hello everyone, out of curiosity I pulled my plugs and put a borescope in to see what my pistons and cylinder walls looked like. I unfortunately found what looks like gold flakes which indicates bearing failure. I’m really hoping maybe it’s not, these pictures are from 2 separate cylinders on each side showing the cylinder walls and top of the piston. The car has 70,000 miles and I purchased it with 61,000 since I’ve owned it I’ve taken good care of it and do my oil changes with 5w40 liqui moly every 2,000 miles. I do beat on the car a lot but only drive it once every 1-2 weeks. I would appreciate any insights on what it is and or what I should do from here, I was planning on going fbo e85 very soon which I why I decided to check this in the first place. Also gonna be doing a compression test soon as well. Would love to hear what everyone has to say. Thank you

Gold flakes???? No wonder gas is so expensive of late. Didn't know gold was being added to our fuel.

 

[SnowFox]

Gold flakes???? No wonder gas is so expensive of late. Didn't know gold was being added to our fuel.

They did add platinum to our catalytic converters conspiracy theory to create false rarity perhaps?

 

[Mike Pfeifer]

Are you sure it’s gold flakes and not just weird light reflection tricks?

 

[Mach VII]

5w-40? Ford calls for 5w-20 btw

 

[Mike Pfeifer]

I also wanted to add that I cannot imagine any scenario where bearing failure evidence shows up inside the cylinder.

 

[NightmareMoon]

yeah drain some oil and cut the filter open. I'd worry about more about visible flakes in the oil. I'm not sure quite what we're seeing on the cylinder walls, but probably not flakes of metal. Looks a lot more like a reflection and some pitting?

I lost a bearing at 100k miles, but I was bouncing off redline and holding a 1.3G sweeper for 4 seconds, and what can I say, it died doing what I love. Diamonds are forever, but bearings sure aint.

 

[GregO]

100% borescope LED magnification related.
All looks good, send it.
5W-40 is perfect, any brand.

 

[NightmareMoon]

I also wanted to add that I cannot imagine any scenario where bearing failure evidence shows up inside the cylinder.

I'm gonna trust the guy with an actual piston/cylinder picture as his avatar.

 

[SnowFox]

Your pictures were perfect for me to test the AI deep research function. Here is what it said. Take with AI grain of salt lol

 

[cummmy5.0]

5w-40? Ford calls for 5w-20 btw

I’m aware, just a personal preference

 

[cummmy5.0]

Are you sure it’s gold flakes and not just weird light reflection tricks?

Could very well be exactly that, however it seems to be in similar spots in each cylinder except for the 2 closest cylinders to the firewall which are completely clean

 

[cummmy5.0]

yeah gold flakes are certainly a typical indicator of bearing failure. But bearing failure isn't necessarily the only thing that causes gold flakes or slivers.

You can pull your oil filter, cut it open and inspect it. Bearing material shouldn't be magnetic (if memory serves) So if you're able to run a magnet over some debris in your filter and it "sticks", it's probably something else, potentially benign potentially not.

Optimistically thinking I've seen other people in other car forums find "gold" flakes, and panic (that's fine, motivates people to get to the bottom of it) and a fair amount of times it was something else. (At least a few times it was a combination of the LED boroscope lights, the honey color oil, and the material making it look gold when it wasn't)

But the first thing I would do is drain my oil, cut my filter just so I can get my fingers on it touch it feel it see how it behaves with a magnet.

Thank you for the advice, I’m doing an oil change soon and I’ll do exactly that and report back

 

[cummmy5.0]

100% borescope LED magnification related.
All looks good, send it.
5W-40 is perfect of any brand !

i

I also wanted to add that I cannot imagine any scenario where bearing failure evidence shows up inside the cylinder.

I honestly never seen that before so I did some research and the most common thing I saw come up was bearing failure which I’m aware could be completely wrong

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