You'd have some extreme blow by with a hole in the piston, it would be shooting air out of the oil cap with it off.
It wouldn't run with no vacuum, the MAP would be showing 100kpa if there was none and it was trying to run.
Thans for heads up... Appreciate the info., kind of relaxed some of my thoughts.
update... So I replaced the front seal. Started her up and all seemed good, no oil, so now I could concentrate on the vac issue. Came back next day, took it off jack stands and rolled her out of garage for start up. Sounded like a funny car, mean as hell, but we all know that's wrong with the 3800 lol. On top of that, there was puddle of oil for a two minute run. Not too good!
So, what to do now? Drop the old engine back in and work the engine? Or remove the front cover in car and see if that'll fix issue. I feel the vac and oil are both the same issue but can't see where it is coming from. Anyways, so I decide to remove the front cover in car and replace all the gaskets, seal and such. PITA, lol, but what the hell at this point.
I take it all apart and everything looks ok, except for one little thing. At the bottom of the front cover where it meets the oil pan flange, there was no RTV there... I can swear I put some down when putting it together. But it was clean... Question is, could this be where the oil was pushng out? The front seal seemed ok, kinda, but it only had two minutes on it anyways. At this point it's ll back together, let everything set up overnight, will drop oil and fill fluids and start her up later tonight when I get home. If it's still spitting oil out I'm gonna freak! Everywhere else was dry, heads down checked by flywheel too, all dry. Oil is at front, behind balancer pulley.
Got my fingers crossed and sacrificed a few small animals to the Pontiac Gods for favorable considerations, lol...