What could have caused this ?

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Honestly looks like it was run on veggie oil or B100 possibly.

When Waste Vegetable Oil or WVO is ran in a diesel it needs to be heated to a very high temp to burn properly. Even so it still won't burn completely on a cold engine and some will leak down past the rings into the crankcase. Some engines even do this when up to temp so the key is change the oil earlier and run constant UOA to make sure you are not getting polymerization.

What happens to my knowledge is the WVO & engine oil mix to form a jello like consistency through time & heat exposure. Some chemical stuff occurs that I can't explain and viola you get a oil pan full of oil gelatin.

Considering it was sold preloved the previous owner knew about it and tried to get rid of the engine. Short of pulling the heads or pan you would never know, that is until pickup screen is blocked.

Clean out the pan & pickup screen. Dump some engine flush in engine to try & flush out the head passages with fresh oil, hopefully the bottom end is still in one piece.
 
You say he was starting it in his garage and getting it up to temperate, but I take it, not driving it out on the roads. I wonder if he was getting it up to temperature but it was not at temperature long enough to drive off any moisture accumulation? I've seen something that looks like that before in a garaged car that was occasionally started but not driven. Basically the guy ended up with an oil/water emulsion in his crankcase. It looked similar but more brown, not as dark. Still, a possibility I think.
 
Originally Posted By: Aidan
One of my colleagues here in the UK with a 1.6 Turbo Diesel VW camper (Vanagon in the US) has recently installed a preloved engine in his vehicle, fresh 15W/40 mineral oil, still in the garage working on other vehicle issues to get it back on the road, but has been running the engine and getting oil warning light. He ran it up to temp and the oil filter was cold so he figured oil pump had failed, but when he tried to drain the oil to remove the sump to get at the pump no oil came out, so he dropped the sump and found this, solid gelatinized gunk, black in colour
IMAG0053.jpg


here's the residue hanging from the pump pick up

IMAG0050.jpg



the old oil that was drained prior to the installation and the filling with the fresh oil that's gone bad appeared to be fine


It's called sludge (black death) caused by lack of oil changes or infrequent oil changes with poor quality oil. After a while the detergent/dispersent and anti oxidant package gets used up and starts to deposit the by products of combustion around the engine as well as the oxidised oil. You'll need to really clean that engine, you may need to flush it too as the oil ways will be fairly restricted with it.
 
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