PS. I just listened to that sound clip again and it sure sounds like the old painfully familiar onset of early rod knock to me. A light metallic dunk, dunk, dunk.. turns to clink, clink, clink.. and eventually turns to clunk, clunk, clunk. Keep beating on it and eventually she breaks and seizes tight. Or maybe she just plain scatters and you drive right over the pan. While I personally can't admit to not being dumb enough to be driving and riding around in rolling hand grenades.. such an explosion quickly teaches you to respect the weights and speeds at which pieces of metal and iron explode. Myself and all the racers and rednecks I've known through the years all got lucky more than a few times. But I also been around racing long enough to know for a fact that not everyone avoids the shrapnel. Transmissions are the worst since you sit beside the axis of all those rotating parts, but engines still bounce parts back towards the driver on occasion. To my ear, and not seeing an oil pressure gauge, that motor is just starting to give you major issues and isn't anywhere near letting parts fly yet but I'd still play it safe to help avoid personal and collateral damage. Lots'a energy suddenly being tossed about when something breaks apart inside an engine and people often underestimate its affect. Physics can be a major bitch.. unless you show her some respect.
You're plight got me curious about how much time could be cheated here? How are you dropping the pan on this little troublemaker? Remove as little as possible to cheat the pan out from the cross-members pinch point?.. ..or just yank the whole works out at once?
how is there enough clearance on this little car to get the rear of the pan out over the main caps? someone correct me if I'm wrong here.. but wouldn't you at least have to relieve the header collectors and jack the motor off the mounts for the pan to clear the rear main cap?
The pan should just be able to drop right down unless you have the V8 belly bar in the way then you would have to remove that
oops.. my bad. Forgot the damned thing was removable. lol I thought he'd at least have to remove the slave cylinder/idler. Good to know cause I'll probably need to be cheating my personal junk apart at one time or another too.
I don't even remember what all I had to do at the time, but I replaced rod and main bearings in the car several years ago. It can be done. I'll probably never do it again.
Since he has a knock changing the bearings wouldn't do him any good, as the journal is most likely no longer smooth or round.