Alright while driving home last night from dropping my son off to his mom, i hit the outskirts of sioux falls out by the roosevelt area, i started hearing a clacking sound coming from under the hood, Thinkin to myself, hopefully just one of the turbo mounting bolts is banging against the manifold cover.
I pull over to do a quick rev and visual inspection, pop the hood, grab the throttle cable and do a quick yank, clack,clack clack. The DSMers worst nightmare, rod bearing failure.

So i limp the car home, trying not to let the car die at every red light, pull in to the driveway and the car dies, starts real hard, finally get it in the garage and pull the manifold cover off, wouldnt you know it 2 of the 4 mounting bolts are loose, get those tightend back down, car starts a little easier, do a small rev with the wife looking on, and all i hear is clacking. Depressed and pissed i shut the hood and went inside to watch TV.

Now i am stuck in between choices, i have 2 cars, my eclipse and my talon, now neither is driveable at the current moment. The talon just needs to be put back together (turbo, gauge cluster, rear interior) and it will fire right up again and then new tags on the plates, or i pull the motor out of the talon and take the process on of swapping the motor into the eclipse.

This was just a rant that i had, after going through and talking to some other people, i am hoping and praying that it may just be a balance shaft bearing failure, i will be pulling the oil pan off tonight or tomorrow to diagnose, and putting the talon back together and getting it in running order so at least i have something to drive in the mean time.

Dont kill a perfectly running car(talon), but oh well.... its your choice, i wouldnt do it.

i am going to be putting the talon back together to drive it while the eclipse gets looked at, the wife really wants her truck back ahaha.

Umm cant you just replace the rod bearings while its in the car, Ive never been that far into a 4G63 but ive done it on a couple of F-bods.

You can replace the rod bearings while everything is still together, but if your rods started knocking, then theres a 99% chance that you will have to resize the rods, theres a thread on this somewhere, ill find it and post it for you, the rods are coming back down and smacking the crank, causing the rod to have an egg shaped end, as well as scoring the crank. Heres the link.
http://www.dsmtuners.com/forums/showthread.php?t=222150&highlight=rod+bearings

i pulled the turbo off, and dropped the oil pan, pulled the turbo apart and all the bearings are shot, sounds like a baby rattle inside of there, plus a half inch chunk of the oil seal was gone, then in the pan there were gold shavings all over the place, mainly sitting around where the oil drain tube sits on the pan. Havent had a chance to pull the end caps off yet to check the rod and main bearings but hopefully soon i can get those replaced and hope the crank is still within spec.

Also the motor had 181,000 miles on it, did a compression test on it and it was still 150,155,155,150. I was stoked about that part.

So if the head on the piston where to get egg shaped the compression numbers still wouldnt be that high, i am pretty impressed with the little mitsu.

here are some pics of what the oil pan looks like http://www.imagestation.com/album/pictures.html?id=2097829422