Ghibli engine knock, timing, rebuilding.

I would like to share my learning experience on this engine with people who may be interested in some deeper insight or answers.

Backstory: I purchased my 2014 Ghibli SQ4 with a known bad engine (rod knock). Upon removing the engine I found it was already a used replacement since it had salvage yard markings. I tore it down and it was just too far gone. Multiple spun rod bearings and spun mains along with grooved cylinder walls. Our local machine shop didn’t have the tooling for line bore and at that time I had no leads on over size bearings or pistons. So I purchased a used engine. After installing I only received just over 1k miles before it too lost a rod bearing (should have checked filter before install). I was able to save this engine and rebuild the bottom end.

During the rebuild process I did find a few notable items. I read a lot about oil pump failures on these engines but don’t think that was my case. The oil pressure was fine on this engine. In fact I was planning on cleaning and reusing the pump because of the price. It was only after I found an affordable replacement from melling did I decide to replace it. M-528 was the model I used from the jeep 3.6. Autozone had it in stock as well as the timing chains. While I was tearing the engine down I notice it was the #1 rod that lost the bearing. I also found the #1 main bearing was nearly gone as well. It looked like it had been scoring for quite some time. As far as what caused the failure, the only sure thing I could find wrong was that the #1 main journal on the crank was tapered. Clearance was .002 tapered down to .001 or so on the tight end. I even flipped the crank 180 and put the last journal in there to make sure it wasn’t the block. It was the crank.



Timing- it took a few tries and some research but eventually I nailed it after finding a couple repair manual pages. I highly recommend purchasing the alignment tool as there is no crankshaft timing mark and you will want the plates to hold the cams while you’re making fine adjustments. There really is also some sort of a mystery here. When I took the engine apart I never removed the cam gears or even touched the bolts. So I didn’t think much of them when trying to time it. So I put it together once before I had the timing tool and just lined up all the marks with the chainlinks etc. started it up, drove around. Got timing codes. So I ordered the tool, took it apart and retimed it. Once I had it
running again it threw the same codes. Took it apart AGAIN and finally found the key. You have to have 12 chain pins between the timing marks on the cams up top. The only way I could achieve this was by loosening the cam gears and turning them just slightly to fit one more tooth over. That is what solved it. Keep in mind that I never touched the gears until that time so I’m not sure how they could be a tooth off. All the cams were labeled and installed where they originally came out.

I’ve Attached some images for reference. Hopefully this has been insightful. I wish I had more pictures but after continuing issues I was never sure what was going to be right or wrong.

Cheers