Well, a quart a month on an old car can be good, or it can be bad. How many miles a month do you drive?
Things to look for: Smoke when you first start up, indicates leaky valve guides. Oil in the coolant, indicates a blown head gasket. Better get this one fixed quick or you will wind up stranded somewhere. Oil at the bell housing, rear seal leak. Oil at the front of the engine, front seal leak. Oil around the valve covers, leaky valve cover gasket. Quite often this can be fixed by tightening the hold down bolts. Oil around the PVC valve, bad PVC valve. Oil around the oil filter, loose oil filter. Oil around drain plug, loose drain plug. Etc, etc, you will notice the only way you will be able to tell about most of those is by keeping your engine clean. Many of these kinds of leaks do not leave obvious drips until they get pretty bad. Of course you could simply be burning it up, the good compression says that is not likely, but you could have an exhaust emissions check done if none of the above turn out to be the problem. Bob Shell wrote: > We seem to have some people here who are pretty well informed about > cars. Let me describe the mystery I am trying to solve. I have a > 1991 Volvo 940 Turbo wagon that I really love. Has always been a > very comfortable and civilized ride. > > Oil is disappearing from the crankcase at the rate of about a quart a > month. It isn't leaking out anywhere since there is no oil on the > carport where I park it. It doesn't smoke or smell of burning oil > from the exhaust pipe when running, and it runs great. I thought > maybe it was time for a ring job, but I had my mechanic run a > compression check and it's just fine. He suggested maybe the PCV > valve was faulty, so I had him replace that, but it made no > difference. I'm just completely stumped on where this oil is going, > and so are both of the mechanics who do work for me. One suggested > putting in some Lucas oil stabilizer in place of a quart of oil, and > I tried that but it made no difference. It's a nuisance to have to > put in a quart of oil a month. > > Any suggestions? > > Bob > -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
