Hey all, I'm hoping someone can help me solve my engine rattle. It sounds almost metallic which I haven't heard anything similar too on other videos I've looked up. I have a small coolant leak that I haven't diagnosed if that helps with anything. This video was also taken after a few minutes of driving around and a warm engine. It sounds to be coming from the left side of the engine but I'm not quite sure where. As I'm writing this I realized I should check my oil level and after about 45 minutes of the car being off the dipstick is bone dry. Im getting towards the end of needing an oilchange but I'm not overdue. Im hesitant to start the car to get a "warm" reading since there's absolutely no oil from what I can see. Finally, upon looking further into my engine bay I noticed some missing screws, and the nut on my motor mount (?) was finger tight as you can see in the video. I'm at 140k miles and it's a 2006 cooper s. What should be my next plan of action? I've attached some photos and heres a link to the video:

First photo was taken shorty after driving around for 10 minutes or so

 

Add oil!

 

I should've said this in the original post, but yes I will definitely be adding oil before I crank the car up again. Should I just replace the filter and call it an oil change?

 

If you're getting close to oil change interval, yes do that. It never hurts to do an oil change more frequently. Especially if you rely on the onboard system, which has too long intervals.
Regardless, you are supposed to check oil level and top up between oil change intervals, not just do an oil change and forget until the next one. Pretty sure it's written on the owner's manual. Especially on an old car.

Basically, any old car will:

• have some oil that escape through the pistons rings and is being burned. Not a lot, but overtime enough to bring your car down to dangerously low level of oil
• have some oil leak. Some of them can be nearly invisible because they don't make it to the floor and are very slow. The top one for first-gens is the crankshaft position sensor, and I can attest it doesn't make it to the floor despite a very worn o-ring.

 

I won’t claim to be enough of an expert to be able to tell you what you should do, but it seems like you have a couple of options. Either add oil and see if the rattle goes away or do an oil change and check your oil and filter for anything unusual.

And of course it wouldn’t hurt to tighten loose bolts and replace missing ones.

By the way, I can’t see the video.

 

Did you ever figure this one out?