So anyone living in the north east knows its been raining with the wrath of god. I was driving home earlier and out of no where it starts pouring the likes ive never seen before. I hit a large puddle and sucked some water into my engine (i have a ebay cai). Immediately realizing this i shut off the engine and pull over to the side of the road, tried cranking it for literaly a second then thought that was probably a bad idea. So i call up my bud Josh and he comes to the rescue with the tools i need to pull the spark plugs. I pull the plugs and crank the engnie to get all the h20 out. Put the plugs back in and the car starts right up. My question is, is it probable that i did any serious harm to the motor? It seems to be running ok just want to get your ideas.
if it was idling, you probably didn’t harm it too much. get an oil change though.
worst case scenario: bent rods, valves… bad pistons and rings… water in the block is not good. dry it out!
i hydrolocked my car pretty bad in vegas… didn’t think i was coming home, but my car now (and still) runs. 
i haven’t ripped it apart yet though… so i dunno how bad it is.
i hydrolocked my car pretty bad in vegas
So you hydrolocked your car in the desert? How the hell did you manage that? :shrug:
hahaha… i know it sounds funny… i didn’t even think of that.
well, when it rains in vegas… there’s no underground drainage for all the runoff… so it runs through the streets.
i couldn’t tell how deep the water was, and my idiot friend kept pushing me to go forward… not til the motor died did i think about what just happened. i felt like an idiot, then began to panic…
it poured like 3 inches in a couple hours when I was there… it was crazy.
thanks to the beautiful maryland weather, i got delayed for my flight home and am now stuck in denver for the night.
i love weather delays… almost as much as i love clovis… lol
I didn’t know that there are different degrees of hydrolocking…? I thought it was just BAM hydrolocked.
in most cases… if you do hydrolock, you’re screwed. the only thing that saved me was the motor wasn’t under load and shut itself off.
it’s the degree of damage… not degree of hydrolock.
When water enters the cylinders, the pistons can’t compress the water like it can air, so the engine stops. When you go to start the car after it has stopped is when the damage usually occurs. The starter motor forces the crank to spin and something has to give, which is usually the bending of a rod.
This is what my rod looked like after I started the engine without getting the water out.
Some guys are lucky and only suck in enough water to stall the engine, not really hydrolocking it. But to be safe, as the OP did, remove the spark plugs and force the water out of the cylinders. Then change your oil.
Everyone told me that my engine was trashed and that I needed a new one. I had $150 in the bank at the time, so I proved them wrong by tearing into my engine, replacing the bent rod with a new one from Acura, and reused everything over again, including the piston, headgasket, and oil pan gasket. All is fine 40K miles later and I am actually at 294K and counting, runs great.