I haven't seen these engines completely apart, but I did saw some pictures of the engine without the oil pan and the rods look fairly accessible. I can't think what could be obstructing access other than the pickup tube. I think it should be doable.

 

Really I think the question is can the pan be separated without unbolting the trans, can the pickup assembly all come out with the motor still in place. I feel like the oil cooler will have to come off and that's fine I know the A/C copmressor will have to swing out of the way , maybe even drop the front subframe if I have to but if I have to pull some sideways bolt out that is right against the oil pump behind the balancer or something dumb like that it will make me rethink the whole process.

 

Yes, I've read several posts of other members replacing oil pans with the engine still on the car. Including one that replaced rod bearings.

I attached the VIDA instructions of the oil pan removal and replacement.

 

Awesome, thanks!
It's just not worth a total rebuild of this motor but knowing that I can do rod bearings alone will likely keep it around for a bit longer.

 

Can confirm on being able to pull and replace the oil pan without removing transmission or much of anything else. Had to do it on mine and it was relatively straight forward.

 

my question at this point is can I feasibly do the rod bearings by just dropping the oil pan

As others have already mentioned, you can. That's exactly what I did with my XC70. Dropping the oil pan will suffice and you can access all rod bearings directly from underneath the car. It took me a couple of hours total and the "quick and dirty" fix has worked great for 100k+ miles so far.

Check the surfaces for scoring and polish them lightly if need be before installing new bearings.

 

Is your car manual? If so, are you certain that the knocking is not the tranny, especially if you happened to install a SMF?

 

Update in case anyone was interested.
I do not believe for a second that these are the original rod bearings because for the most part they look practically new.
Cylinder 2 however was nearing a major catastrophe.

The marks left on the journal are not terribly concerning as i couldn't feel them, and there is no sure answer as to whether they are new marks or what required the bearings to be done some 50k+ miles ago before I owned it.

The job was pretty straightforward as most people said with the exception of pulling the A/C compressor bracket out of the way to get the hardlines aside. If the radiator was out this would have been a 4 hour job.

All in all I feel better about getting another year or two out of the red wagon before its truly knocking on heavens door.

 

Update in case anyone was interested.
[...]
The marks left on the journal are not terribly concerning as i couldn't feel them, and there is no sure answer as to whether they are new marks or what required the bearings to be done some 50k+ miles ago before I owned it.
View attachment 212842

Congrats. Like I mentioned earlier, sorting this out is very straightforward. I would have probably polished the journal before installing new bearings, with a strip of rag and Farecla/Mothers, but minor scoring like this isn't usually a big deal. It may even be just some brass that has rubbed off from the old bearing.

Expect at least 100k miles from the new bearings, mine's still going strong. Not bad for a ghetto-fix. 🤪

 

Thanks for posting, do you know what kind of failure or engine issue causes rod bearings to look like that specifically?

 

Could be a Bad bearing, bad installation, low oil pressure, pre-ignition in that cylinder.

 

Knowing that you can replace the bearings with only* removing the oil pan makes me very tempted to do a bearing replacement once my c30 is no longer my daily driver in 2 years or so.

 

I recommend doing it. I've done it in my two old cars it was really simple, used a plastic straw done one at a time mains and rod bearings.

 

Same thing happened on my 2006 XC90 2.5T. Rod bearing #2 looks exactly like the picture above. There was a slight discoloration on a short strip on #3. I pulled the motor and checked out the main bearings and #1 had a little discoloration and the oil port had some Babbit in it.