Sid....not relevant to the hobby, but...that oil pump story reminds me of the AMC police car program. Long ago I had a friend who was employed at AMC, working on that project. Interesting story, and by strange coincidence.... came back and bit some time in my career with a "popular foreign brand".
When they put together the AMC police cars, the performance and handling were quite good and the slightly more compact exterior (narrower) was found to be an advantage for certain situations. When the field testing started, they eventually ran into oil pressure and oil temperature problems. And so it was....some years after hearing the stories at a late dinner, I found myself involved with a similar police car project that ran into a similar problem.
We had put together a police package demo using our newly introduced V6 powered 4-door sedan. Handling and performance was pretty decent and fuel and brake burn costs were a nice improvement over the (then) available products for patrol cars. Brake burn, for city police cars, often costs almost as much as the gasoline bill (per month).
Within a few months we were getting engine knock complaints (always the number 2 piston scuffed). We had zero problems in civilian use, and so I sent an engineer down to Arizona to "live with the cars" and figure out what was going on.
It was the same problem as the Ramblers (we learned). The test cars were all given to "near retirement" older officers for the initial "long term use" period. In actuality, they tended to spend a lot of time idling in the shade with occasional full throttle jumps to chase down a traffic violation. The extreme long idling pushed oil temps too high and the last piston in the coolant flow pattern was the first to scuff when the officer woke up and did some police work.
My friend later said, "Yup....just about exactly what happened to us at Rambler."
My daddy always said, "There ain't nothing new, under the sun."
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Hope you enjoyed the little story. JimL