dohp

iTrader: (3)

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

OVERKILL

iTrader: (3)

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.

Ponyryd

iTrader: (5)

With 30psi-I'd say it's pretty terminal .
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 .