i'm burning oil...suggestions?
 

my 86GT is burning oil. ultimately it's gonna need to be done right and get a ring job, but i'd like to drive it this summer and wait for next year when i get my heads to tear it down and do that work. in the meantime, is there something i can do, or some product/oil additive i can use to partially restore the seal. ie: i'm looking for a band-aid solution for this season. ive heard i can use a heavier grade oil for short term fix, is there anything else i could try that you guys are aware of?

any suggestions appreciated :)

I'd do an oil system cleaning to remove any old oil build-up (since you don't know the whole maintenence history of the car), then an oil change with 20w50 and a Lucas additive.thumb:

thanks richard. i did the oil change and threw in an additive to assist. when i asked about an engine flushing product (before getting your post) my guy at Lordco told me i'd just be making the problem worse by cleaning it out real good and making the passage for oil to seap by bigger. makes sense to me, but is he right?

Just throwing it out there, but are you sure its due to oil getting past the rings due to them being worn out?

i thought there were a couple other ways for it to burn oil...

PVC screen plugged? i think i have heard of that before....

hmmmm...
 

good point white snake. no, i'm not sure it's the rings. i hadn't heard of the PVC screen thing - thought if i was burning oil it was either the rings or the valve guides or both that were worn. always best to check the simple things first obviously so i'll give the PVC screen a look and let you know. could it be anything else that i could check out?

thanks again for the info. you learn something new every day (well, i learn many new things every day, as there's a heckuvalot i don't know yet:) )

cheers

^Oh, I figured you would have checked/replaced that when you did the intake-it's at the back on the lower.
I doubt you'd make it worse, it's likely getting past the rings b/c of old oil build up on the lower oil rings.
It could be rings, valve guides, valve seals, or a PCV issue.

i must be getting senile. i pulled the screen and valve out this a.m. only to find i DID clean the screen when i installed it in the new lower intake (can't remember doing that, but obviously i did). must be the rings or seals. i'll see how things run with the oil additive i put in and go from there.

thanks guys (AGAIN).

Brake clean works very well on those screens :)
What about the valve gides in the heads?

My father inlaw has a bunch of old chevys for plow trucks, and few of them are oil burners. He said he tryed Engine Restore in one of them and it made a huge differance in oil consumption and he uses it all the time now with great results. How much oil is it burning? One liter between changes is very common for a 5.0L.

well, right now it's burning a LOT, but that's because of a problem with the gaskets i installed when putting in the cobra intake.

once i get that rectified this week-end, i'll try your suggestion out. it was burning a little oil before the intake swap, but not much - prob about a litre between changes.

thanks for the suggestion Quicker!

steve

i found out why my wife's saturn is burning oil, did a compression test and #3 cylinder has 30psi i wondered why the lucas stuff wasn't working, i looked in the spark plug hole when cyl #3 at TDC and i couldn't see it for the oil on top of the piston :S that and the spark plug was fouled immensly, and it looks like the other ones were getting slight detination. :S i hope someone steals it soon

1L between oil changes (depending on your oil change interval) is pretty normal for a forged piston engine. They have looser cylinder to wall tolerances because of the expansion of the forged aluminum. The Hypereutectic pistoned engines have tighter piston to wall clearance because the high silicon content of these pistons means they expand/contract a fraction of what their forged counterparts do.

This is part of the reason Ford made the switch (and possibly the entire reason, because I'm doubting they were getting the Hypereutectic pistons any cheaper from TRW then they were the forged ones) to the Hypereutectic pistons in '93, because emissions standards were being tightened and to get the engine to be a lighter polluter, they were able to run tighter piston-to-wall clearances, thus reducing blow-by on the later engines. This reduced the emissions and made the engines easier to comply with the standards.

My Town Car (cast pistons) goes through about 1L every 8,000Km, which, with 327,000Km on it, I think is pretty reasonable.

With 30psi-I'd say it's pretty terminal run: .
You may be able to slow it down if you run an oil system cleaner through it, or even dump some in that cylinder directly. Problem usually is that old gummy oil (sludge) gums up the oil rings and they don't clean the oil off the wall when the piston goes down, then it just gets burned and gets worse and worse. A system additive at that time does little to nothing to help with the problem because it's not de-gumming the rings wall: .