ce_hensley

I've noticed a sudden oil leak - meaning the engine never leaked a single drop up to 50,000 miles - and then one day after coming home from the shop I noticed small amounts of oil on the garage floor.

Two things happened concurrently which may have contributed to this and I'm looking for advice. The first thing is the shop visit where they checked my AC out, adding some refrigerant I believe. The very first leaking began for sure when I parked it after this visit.

The other thing that happened a week or two before this is that I overfilled the oil. I was concerned about that and I read the posts about this, but felt there was little risk in problems, so I didn't suck any oil out - just let it ride.

So now the leak is pretty substantial. The engine cover looks oily with oil leaking from more than one of the holes. There is no smoking or much smell of burning oil out of the ordinary. In the bottom picture, the oil in the foreground is from a 24 hour period, after taking the car out, warming it up yesterday, adding oil to end of twist on dipstick and then parking overnight. The older "puddle" is from about 3 months not being driven.

How bad might this be? How minimal might this be? Merry Christmas to me right?

Van1

Kind of hard to tell where the leak is coming from with that engine tray in the way. Put the car on jack stands, get that tray off and have a look around.

abiazis

Good advice from Van1...........could be coming from a variety of sources, i.e. transmission case leak, valve cover/s leak, etc......

Hopefully nothing serious, but a gasket repair, etc.....

Van1

Is the top of the engine wet at all anywhere? Are the top valve covers wet? Any oil pooling on the engine tin? If not, you'll definitely need to have a look at the bottom side.

ce_hensley

Nothing on top anywhere. Seems definately on the bottom. I've searched high (and not low) from up above.

Van1

How long ago was your oil changed? You mentioned overfilling a few weeks ago, did you change your oil yourself recently or were you just topping off? If you did it recently, maybe you didn't snug the filter or drain plug enough or use a fresh crush washer on the drain plug?

Otherwise, could be leaking lower valve cover gaskets, oil return tube seals, timing chain covers, etc. More investigation will be needed.

Quadcammer

this is all rampant speculation.

gotta pull the engine tray

Mike J

We like rampant speculation - mucho fun!

Left hand chain cover looks wet, but hard to tell.

Van1

Don't think anybody is speculating on what the source of his particular leak is, Quad. Merely providing suggestions on things to look at and where to start.

Quadcammer

thats fine, but what he needs to do is pull the tray, clean that thing up well, and then start to look for issues. There are dozens of places these things can leak as you guys know.

TMc993

There's going to be a mess inside that engine tray.

AOW162435

Yep.


Andreas

No HTwo O

And throw try away.

NP993

You overfilled the oil, but kept driving it. Now it's leaking oil. I don't think you have to be Sherlock Holmes.....

KaiB

Please do elaborate on the above, rather definitive statement.