The Sunday News
Lovert Mafukure
My car consumes a lot of oil and I have to top up every now and then. How can I rectify this problem?
We are back again, new week new problems. Cars never seem to run forever with no problems. This week one of our readers has a common problem — excessive oil consumption.
We will look at possible causes and possible remedies to his problem. Without much background info we will look at most possible causes and likely remedies.
It might seem pretty straight forward but the first thing to check is for oil leaks.
If your car is by any chance leaking some oil then your guess is right, your oil is going back to nature. Whenever you top up your oil, never overfill, that is how oil leaks start. If you overfill your engine with oil, you will eventually blow oil seals. With too much oil and pressure inside the engine, it will look for release points and the weakest points are oil seals. You can give your engine a good wash and then check for any leaks on the engine. It might just be as simple as oil leaking out of the engine.
The usual suspect areas for leaks are camshaft and crankshaft seals, the valve/tappet cover gaskets, sump gaskets and the like. The simple way out of a leaky situation as this one would be to replace the leaking seals or gaskets. It’s not much of a big job to cost a lot of money.
If you are certain that you do not have any oil leaks then the engine may be burning oil. Burning oil may not be an immediate problem to worry about if your engine is a high mileage one.
High mileage engines start burning more oil with time. If it hasn’t started causing other problems then it shouldn’t be an immediate attention seeker.
Problems that usually arise with oil consumption are fouled plugs and consequently the irritating miss-fire. Apart from that, oxygen sensors and catalytic converters can and will be affected by an engine consuming a lot of oil. Sensors will get coated with oily residues and catalytic converters will get clogged up and retard engine performance.
An engine that consumes oil is easy to identify because of the colour of the smoke from the exhaust. Blue smoke is almost a sure sign that your engine is burning oil. You’d need then to identify where the problem is coming from.
Does it smoke continuously? Does it smoke after parking for a while only? If the smoke goes away after running the engine for a while the problem may lie with the upper half of the engine, the cylinder head. It may possibly be worn valve guides or seals.
It means oil drips into the combustion chambers when engine is idle and gets burnt when you start up the engine. Such a car may miss-fire on first start up because of that.
On the other hand, if the engine rings are worn out you will find that the car smokes most the time, even after running it for a while. It means the oil scrapper rings are no longer sealing well and oil finds its way into combustion chamber. A simple compression test can tell you how much life you have left in your engine. A simpler equation to help you ascertain goes like this . . . smoke under load usually points to worn rings, smoke with no load usually points to valve stem seals or worn valve guides.
Since vehicles with high mileage naturally consume oil more than lower mileage engines, it is good to change to high mileage oil which is specially formulated to lower oil consumption on older vehicles with high mileage.
Leaks, as I mentioned earlier, are easier to deal with and require one to replace the seals and gaskets with new ones. Gaskets lose their strength with time and need replacing over time. This does not really cost a fortune.
Valve seals and guides require specialist mechanics to replace. It may or may not cost a lot of money to replace valve stem seals, depending on how the mechanic decides to do it. Naturally the head has to come off to replace the seals but there are short cuts like pressurising the cylinders to keep the valves from falling into the chamber. It may keep the costs down if the mechanic is willing to go that route.
Worn rings mean one thing and that is major engine overhaul which might cost you a bit of money and has to be done right. Till next time . . . keep the wheels spinning!
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+263772339938 – [email protected] -@automartusc
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