[V8] oil leaks and such
Dave Saad
dsaad at icehouse.net
Mon May 19 14:43:38 PDT 2008
First off, the good news. My poor old V8 has not been on a good road
trip in years - instead suffering the humiliation of sitting in the
garage while I drive my old clunker Ranger. Well - we took it down to
Jackpot and boy was it fun to finally drive it how it wants to be
driven. More than a few times the girls in the back seat would say
"hey - you are doing 100 MPH". Yup. I sure was. Not a drop of
burned or leaked oil either. I got 22 MPG average which I thought
was OK considering I was running 87 octane fuel and had four people
in there. I swear it is sitting in the garage smiling now.
And a boring note on the ranger - it failed emissions (high speed CO)
so I gave it a tune up. It still had the OEM (1983) plug wires, cap
and rotor. One plug wire was clear off the cap and a 3/4 inch spark
was passing from the corroded green cap post through the rotten boot
to fire the old worn out plug so well that I did not really notice a
misfire. In fact, the motor somehow passed low speed tests. The coil
wire was also badly corroded.
Total cost in parts for complete ignition parts and carb kit was
$178. I put the new parts in, tuned it by ear, and it flew through
emission testing today. Runs a whole lot better too!
On the persistent oil leaks, someone here pointed out that seals can
have different lip offsets. Make sure this is not a problem. I know
I had a really hard time getting the rear main seal installed without
knocking off the lip seal spring. I suppose that could happen on
smaller seals too. The dye trick should pinpoint the problem for you
too. It worked great for me on my last coolant leak.
Dave
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