Originally Posted by JLTD
Hopefully you got a UOA? It would be good for comparison with other similar engines.
UOA won't even see any of the flakes, they are orders of magnitude too large. Only the bits of aluminum that have already been pulverized and ground up will be visible, since ICP is only looking at things ~7 microns and smaller. These pics show why it's wrong to try to make judgment calls on wear based on a UOA as the only data point... filter debris analysis and analytical ferrography is what the OP would need in this case to figure out if the flakes are piston, cylinder, cam, bearing, etc etc.
Thanks for pics OP, hope your problems are over now. BTW... I believe this would fall under the term I recently learned with some new machinery at work... "infantile failure" for when it poops the bed essentially out of the gate. I thought the term was a little humorous.