Let me start this off with I am an idiot...

now that we have that out of the way, was driving like a moron before , hit 3rd gear, flooring it, shifted at about 5500 to go to 4th... of course I missed 4th and hit 2nd! tires barked like a dog getting shot, car jerked... the needle was definitely in the red luckily im fast and pulled off the gas and hit the clutch quick... If i had to guess it hit about 6500 rpms maybe more.. only caught a glance when I yanked off....

Anyway I put it back into gear and continued about 1/2 mile home and idled in my driveway... I dont hear anything, i dont see anything (but it is dark), oil pressure is fine, and the car seemed to run the same. Any chance I screwed my car up???

 

My Z is obviously not a 6-speed, but I did the same thing with my old 5-speed Sunfire (no flames please ) and I know other guys have done it with their Z's. As long as you don't hear any noticable ticking noises............well, ANY noise that is new............then you're lucky, the engine is probably fine. That $h!t happens every now and then, and the most likely consequence is a bent pushrod (or 2, or 3, ) but if the car sounds okay and is running okay, then you got away with it......this time!!!

Just watch out for that 3 - 4 (or 2!) shift in future.

 

do a compression test, i bet you probably bent some valves too. i did the same thing had to take off my heads and get new valves, pushrods and springs. haven't done it since.
what ever you do, do not make the same mistake i did and buy the stuff from a dealership or you will get raped up the ***. if something if going to take awhile to get there and the dealer has it, wait for it to come from somewhere else.

at the very least you bent some pushrods, gl with it

 

Even though its running fine???

Theres no way it got beyond the rev limiter at 6800 i saw the tach, it was in the red tho... so you still think I did damage???

 

you could have done some damage, just keep driving the car and see if you notice anything. I never missed the 3-4 gear and actually hit second though i almost did one time but luckily it didn't go into gear. After that i started shifting from 3-4th gear with the palm of my hand facing the passanger making it almost impossible to miss the shift.

 

hmm good idea... I do that with 6th all the time... time to do it with 4th....

 

if it runs, you probablty don't need to taek off the heads or anything, but i would still do the test to see how many if any valves got bent or anything.
i can pretty much garuntee you bent a pushrod.

you want to know how far you did actually rev your engine..

at 5500 rpm in 3rd you are doing 94 mph
that is the same as 7500 rpm in 2nd

http://www.f-body.org/gears/ check it out for yourself, and set the rev limiter to 10000 rpm so it goes higher to give higher numbers.

 

I say do the test but if u dont have the rev limiter disabled with a programer u should be allright because my friend was doing donuts in first in his a4 b4c and his car has been running fine for 2000 miles

 

I gotta drive it to work now... anything in particular I would notice that would be a dead giveaway that I bent a pushrod?

 

yeah problem is a rev limiter wont stop you from mechanically overrevving the engine, computer cant stop physics....

 

Turn it on and listen for any ticking. Let it warm up to avoid anything and drive real slowly. If you are seriosly low on power, that will not be a good sign. Listen for any noises. And my advice is to shift slowly

Let yourself feel neutral in the gearbox. That is how I avoid this stuff. And how high in the red....like 7200? I always thought the fuel-cut off was 6500?

 

thats all fine and dandy that it shut off the fuel, but the engine still turned that fast and a stock ls1 does not like 7500 rpm. there is no such thing as a mechanical rev limiter. if you shift it into a lower gear at high rpm it will go and will cause problems.

 

Would you notice some constant ticking? Most LS1 have a kind of loud valvetrain anyway, but wouldn't this be a noise that wouldnt go away?

 

After owning a couple Turbo Buicks Im a master of noticing different sounds in a noisy valvetrain. The car has the same noises as before and no new ones have been added, no ticking at all, and if anything the car seems to be running better with more power than before LOL!

As I said before... it really couldnt have been higher than like 6800, it definitely didnt pin the needle and I think it could have been only 6500 it all went by in a flash soo....

No matter what, rev limiter, fuel cutoff, none of that can stop you from mechanically overrevving an engine... I guess I was lucky this time, hopefully there isnt a next time!

 

Even if it is running fine, check the pushrods at the very least. Most people I talked to agree that ~6400-6500rpm the failure point for stock pushrods. Its easy to check and valve cover gaskets are cheap, or if your cheap you can reuse them if they look ok. When my car bent a pushrod it ran fine and made no noticable noise. But even still the pushrod was bent. Fix it before it starts making noise.