[alfa] V6 oil consumption

[Joe Elliott <jee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I had myself 95% convinced that I needed to get myself a used engine 
for Christmas if I was going to keep my poor GTV-6 on the road.  The 
oil consumption and the related cloud of smoke that followed me 
around had me convinced that there had to be something really wrong 
with that engine.  I even convinced myself that it felt slightly down 
on power.

But today on the way home from a birthday celebration for a friend, I 
followed a rather reckless friend of ours back into Pittsburgh (saw a 
silver '80s Spider on 279 just south of the Ft. Pitt Tunnel at ~3:30 
by the way--anyone on the list?), and had to work the engine 
considerably harder than usual to keep up with him.  It ran very 
well, and didn't really feel like it was lacking any power.  What 
really surprised me was when we got back into traffic, the Alfa 
wasn't belching smoke like it usually does.  I can hardly call this 
conclusive, because we weren't in traffic all that  long, and 
depending on the wind, it's hard to tell what's coming out of my 
exhaust, but it's been pretty noticable lately.  As in big-time 
embarrassing.  But it certainly seemed to have improved dramatically 
after I'd been pushing the engine a little bit.

So what's the deal?  I suppose it's true that I don't rev much beyond 
3500RPM on a regular basis when I have my car at school, so you could 
call this an Italian Tune Up.  But I redline the engine routinely 
during the summer, and the oil consumption got pretty bad over this 
past summer.  Is there something in there that just doesn't get up to 
temperature unless I'm really working the engine?  Something that 
gets up to temperature from 15min of spirited driving, but not from 5 
hours at constant speed on the freeway?  I can't imagine that any 
kind of deposit that I may have cleared out would be responsible for 
the oil smoke.  Would I be a fool to spend $300 on a used engine?  I 
really want to run the car at Nelson Ledges later this month, but I 
was thinking maybe I shouldn't if my engine was about to die.  (I 
even had a dude in an old E23 BMW pull up next to me at an 
intersection and say "Your car's shot."  (I say "yeah.")  "You're not 
going to make it home.")  Should I just go ahead and do the track 
day, and see if it smokes any less under that kind of abuse?  Will a 
seemingly-strong engine that burns a quart of oil every 250 miles 
leave me stranded without warning?  I would think it would have to be 
a gradual thing, like a loss of compression, but seeing that cloud 
behind me makes me uneasy about making any of the trips I had planned 
for this semester.

Thanks for any input,
Joe Elliott
'82 GTV-6
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