On 06:05 PM 10/21/02 -0700, Ken said...
Whoa, just yesterday and today, I started noticing a brief flash from the low oil light whenever I went over speed bumps. I didn't give it another thought because I have never had a low oil problem before. There were no oil patches on the garage and it has only been about 4871 km since my last oil change. The crazy thing was I had to put in "2 liters" of oil to get the oil level back to the middle of the "oil zone" on the oil dip stick. I am glad my engine had not seized on me. I hope it hadn't hurt my engine.How often do you find yourself re-filling the oil to where it's between the two marks on the dippy?
I never noticed any blue smoke coming from my exhaust and there is no oil stains in my garage. I pull my spark plug wires and looked inside the spark plug chamber area and there was a tiny bit of oil around the base of the 2 spark plugs from the drive side, but it wasn't drowned in it. I have been using Mobil 1 5w30 for years and this was the first time that I had to top up my oil level before oil changes.
Strange, I don't know what to make of it.
Ken
90si
172,107 km.
As I was just telling Mark Humphrey's with respects to an oil leak, one of my past cars had a leak from the seal behind the crank/pulley. It started small to where it was a fine mist of oil that would coat the underside of the engine until it finally became a formal "drip".
The problem was first noticed when I was doing an oil change and notice said oil mist on the underside.
I recall not giving it much attention at first.
Then when I went to do the next oil change (about 5K miles later), it was there again and this time I did give it some attention.
Before wiping it off, I tried to see if I could locate where it was coming from but was unable to.
My best guess at that time was the crank seal or perhaps a leaking valve cover gasket (but that would have also coated more of firewall). Again, given the location of the misting and where it had coated itself, the crank seal was the only place that I could see that it could be coming from.
When the mist turned into a drip, it was pretty easy to spot.
The misting that I had went on for a long time before it became a full fledge drip. I would say nearly 18 months.
I also probably would not have noticed the problem if I hadn't taken the time to clean the engine, transmission and the engine bay. When I first got this car, I had to R&R the clutch, flywheel and one of the engine mounts. So I took that opportunity to clean up said areas.
Jiggy's engine area is sort of the same way which makes it easy to spot any sort of leak.
You can also burn oil without there being any blue smoke. It depends on the size of the leak at the ring(s) (amongst other things).
Our Audi 5000 had a bad ring on cylinder 1 which caused it to burn oil but it never made that cool "James Bond Smoke Screen" out the back (even when we got on the throttle hard)...
Robert K. Kuhn
CRX Owners Group President (http://www.crx.org/southcal)
1990 Honda CRXsi (http://www.hooligan.cc)
ICQ # 3714283 (nickname: godzilla)
