What are the potential issues if you swap OEM engine bearings for aftermarket bearings on a 2004 Toyota Matrix? My father claims the engine noise is due to old and worn out bearings and wants to change them with aftermarket amazon bearings.
you never just change engine bearings. If you need help then please give context. Start from the beginning. Give specific details about the symptoms your car has (what type of noise, when do you hear it, where do you hear it, etc.), and any troubleshooting you've done. Thanks.
What are the potential issues if you swap OEM engine bearings for aftermarket bearings on a 2004 Toyota Matrix? My father claims the engine noise is due to old and worn out bearings and wants to change them with aftermarket amazon bearings.
What is your current mileage? It's required for every post, especially this one.
Why are you replacing the mains in the first place? The main bearings should be fine unless you made a habit of running your car dangerously on oil all the time, in which case, the entire engine needs rebuilding, not just the main bearings.
The main bearings are almost always the last thing to go if you're too low on oil (insufficient oil in the mains leads to rock knock). The oil pump pumps oil through the main bearings first, then it goes up to lubricate the valves, and lastly, the piston rings before draining back to the oil pan.
I think your father doesn't know what he's talking about, to be honest. If you're tearing apart an engine that far (that's basically as far as you can go), everything else needs rebuilt as well.
Good aftermarket bearings from a reputable manufacturer are fine. Chinese/counterfeit junk from Amazon or eBay is not. Don't forget that the crank can be worn also, requiring it to be ground undersize at a machine shop with correspondingly resized bearings installed. Clearance is critical and needs to be checked with plastigauge. Then you have to deal with whatever additional excessive wear or damage is found in the engine. Blindly slapping in cheap bearings can easily make things worse.
Before even digging into that you have the issue of just where is the noise actually coming from? It could be valve clatter. It could be rod bearings rather than or in addition to main bearings. It could be piston slap. It could be something completely different. (It might help if you provided a youtube video demonstrating the noise. For that matter there are plenty of videos on youtube where you can hear what different types of engine noises sound like.)
Unless that thing has about a million miles on it the bearings in those engines would normally go bad only if they were run without oil, the engine was revved way over redline, or coolant got into the oil and damaged the bearings.
