Re: [alfa] V6 oil consumption

[Steve Moresi <smoresi@xxxxxxx>]

Joe,
Please forgive me if you have posted answers to these questions before:
Have you done a compression or leakdown test on the engine?
Have you replaced the valve stem seals?  ( I seem to remember reading this...)
Have you cleaned out the oil vapor separator like everyone has been talking 
about?

Anyway, it could be that your cylinder walls were very, very glazed, (edit: 
or there was a ring stuck in its groove, but the fix should be the same) 
causing lots of blowby in the cylinders.  It seems maybe the 5 hour drives 
on the freeway would cause this, as there is not (relatively) high pressure 
in the cylinders, causing the rings to not keep the walls clean.  Then the 
15 minutes of hard driving increased cylinder pressure and temperature that 
it cleaned up the cylinder walls (or un-stuck the ring).  If it was (is) 
consuming that much oil, you can just check it in a couple of days to see 
if the consumption rate is the same...

Steve
'74 Spider
'65 Spider

At 01:14 AM 9/8/2003 -0400, you wrote:

> 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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