Quote:
Originally Posted by Brian Carlton
You failed to note the possibility of worn valve guides in conjunction with the seals. The guides would leak oil continuously, unrelated to load.
Therefore, if the oil consumption is much greater under high airflow (not necessarily high load), the culprit is the turbo seals.
You can verify this by revving it up to 3000 rpm in the driveway. If it smokes badly, similar to the situation on the highway (actually should be worse because the vehicle is stationary), you found your issue.
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I'm not at home at the moment (college) so I can't do this stuff in person but I got my dad to do the 3k-rpm stationary test and when he did it, He could NOT get a cloud of smoke out the back. The smoke while I was driving it on that trip seemed intermittant.... there would be a cloud for a few miles and then not as noticable for a little while. I couldn't find any pattern so I'm assuming it just was a difference in my speed or engine load that I didn't readily observe.
In any case... we're still going to try to visually look down at the turbo and see if there's a puddle of oil in it the next chance we get, and I'm reading threads now on the oil separator. I'm wondering if perhaps the check valve at the bottom of the separation mechanism is plugged or stuck, and so the oil that normally would recirculate into the engine is instead burning.
Somebody in another thread mentioned that the vacuum pump could fail and let oil into the air cleaner that way. The air box IS oily, so I'm going to try to read up on that too.
I want to thank everybody for their patience in letting me ask questions about cars I can't do hands-on tests on except every few weekends and then report back and re-visit old issues when I'm finally dealing with them in person.