Ok my bargain buy has started to smoke real bad first thing in the morning if left overnight and then again when I leave work. At first I could really only smell fuel and thought it may be a cold start issue but now it’s starting to smell oily so I’m pretty sure it’s valve stem seals. It clears within the first couple of miles of driving and doesn’t smoke at all on overrun or when sat in traffic.
I went to a local garage to ask advice and was told to expect a bill over £400 to do the job.
So my options are
1- fix and be gutted that I’ve spent a lot of money
2- get another engine and drop that in ( my engine has done 255k kms)
3- sell it as is for someone to fix it up
4- or just live with the huge embarrassment of James Bond style smoke screens
Before you do anything, I would be sure I know what the fault is. Usually stem oil seals will produce a puff of blue smoke when you pull away from sitting in traffic E.T.C. That is to say engine hot, or having topped up with oil.
A compression test would be a good idea, also check the crankcase breather, is it blocked, is it breathing heavily? Is there oil in the coolant? Or coolant in the oil?
basically, don’t go spending money hoping to fix it, get the fault identified. I am wondering if there are any owners club friendly mechanics near you who would be able to advise?
Yeah I wouldn’t spend £400 without being very sure it was going to fix it. It could well be rings, stem seals or both. Does it use oil noticably quickly? Have you tried a slightly heavier 10W40? Check the pcv valve too easy to do.
I’ve not changed the oil out yet, have tried a couple of stop smoke type products.
it is an embarrassing amount of smoke but really only for the first 2 miles and then no smoke at all, not in traffic, going down hill on engine braking or gear changes / hard aacceleration.
Doesnt use oil.
only thing I have done recently is paint the cam cover but don’t see how that would start it
When the car has stood for a few hours the oil in the cam cover can drain down into the cylinders and exhaust track, on start up it burns until it’s all gone. You describe classic leaking oilseals .
Or sticking oil ring; common issue on the BP engine. I ended up going the second hand engine route, after embarassing amounts of white smoke in the morning (leaving valves; blue smoke), and consulting the resident forum technical guru. In short, his advice I could through £500 “fixing” the engine, and still end up with a smoker.
I don’t regret the engine swap, except I wish I had gone for P5 MK2.5 vvt install. To source a decent engine and then to get it fitted (a job beyond me) cost the best part of £1000. A P5 VVT conversion was estimated at £2500.
After the engine was swapped, I got the mechanic to pull the head off the old engine (mainly because I wanted the head). It was pretty clear all was not well with number 1. The car was using massive amounts of oil by the end; 1-1.5 liters per 1000 miles or so. 200k kms on that engine (1996, so higher compression version). The engine was probably very repairable, but not on my wallet.
But, despite all that, the car drove very well. Like other people with the same problem, compressions were well within spec. Have a read of this, which goes into it more, and discusses some last ditch engine cleaning treatments (which don’t really work):
I had heavy oil consumption before I noticed the smoke; the smoke being white, maybe at first I just thought it was just steam, on a cold morning start, because it always went away pretty quickly. Then all of a sudden the smoking became clown car like.
I tried all sorts of experiments to try and work out where the oil was going (with less than 200k kms on the clock, you don’t really expect the motor to be worn out). A defective PCV valve was mentioned, or crank case pressurisation. So I set up a line, with a clear fuel filter, between the camcover and the inlet manifold. Although some oil was trapped there, nowhere near enough to explain the oil consumption.
I suspect sticky or worn out oil control rings. I had this problem with mine (see Smokey Start Up somewhere in this section about 5 months ago). The smoke probably disappears after a couple of minutes because the catalytic converter has heated up and is now mopping up the smoke - although the engine is still producing it. Eventually the cat stopped working on mine and I became a portable fog machine. My oil consumption was also horrendous. Opinions differ on the rebuild/second hand engine route. You need to know the condition of a second hand unit or you might have the same problems all over again.
Cheers guys, I don’t seem to be having any major oil consumption and I’m pretty sure I have a slight blow on the exhaust manifold so ill look at that too.
And first thing today before running it and after it has been left overnight I whipped the plugs out.
Oil on the threads is oil on the top of the cylinder head, not the cylinders. It’s the state of the plug electrodes which indicates the health of the bores, rings and state of tune.
It depends. If the engine isn’t using oil it means very little ime. Oil on the outside of the plug body indicates a leak from the rocker cover, but oil on just the plug threads themselves is a random thing I’ve had on every car or motocycle for 40 years.
I always suspected it was due to slight blow by the plug gasket or taperseat allowing unburnt oil to gradually accumulate in the thread. Here are mine below taken out after 30K miles, just one, far left, has “oil” on the thread.
Anyway, this is now the internet age so I did a bit of searching and found this which is the only rational explanation I can see for an engine which is otherwise runing fine and using no oil. This guy puts it well so here it is verbatim and thanks to him.
“While it may look like dirty oil, it isn’t, this is unburnt fuel that all the lighter elements in the fuel have boiled off leaving the heavier hydrocarbon components behind. This is not unusual to find even on race engines. I wouldn’t have known this myself if I hadn’t run acrossed the explanation from a very respected pro engine builder on another site. This “fuel” is here because the seal(tapered seat or gasket) is above the threads but the threads themselves are shielded from the actual combustion process. Almost sounds crazy but it is true.”
The plug electodes all look the same colour to me from the photo. Not the ideal colour as appear a little sooty and dark, indicating an overrich mixture.
Did you have any clean oil above the plug threads when you removed them? As Geoff says a worn out rocker gasket can leak oil into the plug wells.
