i had to replace my oil pump seal and thats when he said that my crankshaft moved side to side. how much should it be able to move.

Side to side is a serious problem. Maybe even more than front to back. The thrust washers keep it from moving front to back. Side to side is something else entirely. I don't even know if bearings can wear that much to give you detectable side to side movement.

The bottom line here is any crankshaft movement is bad. Anything you can feel with your hands is way beyond stock.

The next bottom line is that you need to diagnose this. We can sit around all day speculating about the problem and giving you ideas, but...you need to get a hard diagnosis or just replace the engine and figure out what the failure was at a later date. We are not there, we cannot see it. Driving it is a bad idea. It needs to be fixed and we are at that point where you or your mechanic need to decide the next step.

Good Luck,
Michael

To reiterate, DRIVE NO MORE. Heck, if you need to get it somewhere else for repair, have it towed. Do not drive, do not idle.

If you have front-to-back in-axis movement in your crank, you may be able to replace the thrust bearings. If you have any sort of side-to-side out-of-axis movement, your bearings are entirely shot, and I'd be worried about the crank (and perhaps the connecting rods and main journals themselves!)

I is *possible* (but difficult) to drop the oil pan with the engine installed to diagnose the engine, but you may as well just yank the motor. If you have more than just a little non-rotational movement, you'll want to tear that motor all the way apart to clean the metal out of it. Best case (and somewhat unlikely) scenario: you need new bearings, and can re-use everything else. Worst case scenario: you find out what else is damaged, add up the bill, and find out that it is not worth fixing. FWIW, taking an engine apart goes quite quickly, and should not drive up your diagnostic cost too much -- reassembling an engine takes considerably more time and more care.

Randii