Oil disappearing and oil pressure gauge fluctuation

[hippiehulahooper]

just drove over 900 miles round trip. I just changed the oil before the trip.
on the way back the bar gauge started fluctuating from 2.5 to 3.5 back and for fairly rapidly with no change in foot pressure on the accelorator and grade of slope. then buzzer came on when turning curve. so I pulled over and filled with oil. registered 4 bar and held at about 3 3/4 bar for 140 miles then 10 miles before the house it started doing it again. fluctuating between 2.5 and 3.5 quickly as if I was pushing in on the throttle.

slowed down just before home for curve and buzzer went off on curve as I slowed down and bar went down.

got home checked oil and not registering on the stick. where did it go.

coolant looks clean.
no excessive oil on the pan or around the valve cover.

has been using oil since I got it.

does this indicate that the bearing or rings needs to be redone?

at a loss here at the moment.

[jkeiffer_gearhead]

check to see if your intake manifold has a bunch of oil in it. do you have the valve cover breather tube that T's down the the crankcase? if not then you want it as it will help get rid of oil usage.

later
jkeiffer

[kevin g]

Hey man, I had similar disappearing oil issues before with a high mileage car, until I tried a $4 bottle of Rislone Ring seal which actually stopped the oil usage within 10 miles, believe it or not. Im still in denial myself, but it did work!! Incredible results!! Went from a constant cloud of blue smoke to regular, light black on accelerating, no blue!! I guess if its really bad you could use a bottle and a half or two bottles. But one worked for me.
Prior to using this, Ive tried Lucus, Bardahl, and a bunch of other expensive crap with NO results. However I haven't used sea foam. I hear that works too.
Give Ring seal a try, let me know what kind of results you get

[Quantum-man]

Sounds like rings wore. 900 miles can use a lot of oil if oil scraper rings tired. Nothing to be seen in the valve cover if that is the case Maybe removing an injector will show more

[hippiehulahooper]

check to see if your intake manifold has a bunch of oil in it. do you have the valve cover breather tube that T's down the the crankcase? if not then you want it as it will help get rid of oil usage.

later
jkeiffer

took off air filter no oil on the back of the filter or in the inake breather box.
yes I have the T breather tube on it.

Hey man, I had similar disappearing oil issues before with a high mileage car, until I tried a $4 bottle of Rislone Ring seal which actually stopped the oil usage within 10 miles, believe it or not. Im still in denial myself, but it did work!! Incredible results!! Went from a constant cloud of blue smoke to regular, light black on accelerating, no blue!! I guess if its really bad you could use a bottle and a half or two bottles. But one worked for me.
Prior to using this, Ive tried Lucus, Bardahl, and a bunch of other expensive crap with NO results. However I haven't used sea foam. I hear that works too.
Give Ring seal a try, let me know what kind of results you get :D

I might have to try that.
what are your compression numbers?

Sounds like rings wore. 900 miles can use a lot of oil if oil scraper rings tired. Nothing to be seen in the valve cover if that is the case Maybe removing an injector will show more

I checked the oil cold and nothing on the dip stick.

what about putting in oil, getting her warm and doing another compression and compare the numbers? if the rings are worse wouldn't that show in the numbers?

what can I see through the injector hole, cylinder wall?

[82vdub]

Rings that are shot or got to hot and the temper came out of them will use oil like no tomorrow. Depending on how worn the cylinder walls are, you could remove the pistons, hone the cylinders, reinstall pistons with new rings, bearings, gaskets etc and hopefully get many more years out of her. I once had a VW that sucked oil so bad, I had to stop after 200 miles and put a quart of oil in. Joke was to fill the oil and check the gas. Towards the end before I pulled the motor and replaced it, I was getting around 100 miles to a quart.

[hippiehulahooper]

Rings that are shot or got to hot and the temper came out of them will use oil like no tomorrow. Depending on how worn the cylinder walls are, you could remove the pistons, hone the cylinders, reinstall pistons with new rings, bearings, gaskets etc and hopefully get many more years out of her. I once had a VW that sucked oil so bad, I had to stop after 200 miles and put a quart of oil in. Joke was to fill the oil and check the gas. Towards the end before I pulled the motor and replaced it, I was getting around 100 miles to a quart.

I had the head off about a year ago and the walls looked great with no lip.
I wonder what it will look like now.

I wish we still had that rering tutorial.

so I will need to buy:
Connecting Rod Bearing Set
Main Bearing Set
rings
head gasket
oil pan gasket

and I'll need to:
deglaze cylinder
how do I find ring size to order and bearing size?

[82vdub]

The cylinder still may not have lip to it. If it was overheated pretty bad, the tension could have come out of the rings and simply the aren't holding much pressure to the cylinder walls anymore. It may or may not have a ridge. You will need the upper end gaskets as well. Depending on mileage, new timing belt and tensioner too. Hagar talks about honing the cylinders with the block in the car, but somehow you do need to clean up all the leftover metal pieces in the motor before you reassemble.

If your pistons are standard size and the bores aren't too worn, then you would use standard size rings to go with the pistons. The bearings will need to be sized to the crank, if it's undersized already or standard size. No matter what size it is, plastigage it to make sure the clearances are within tolerance, or you should get the crank turned and use the correct sized bearings for the new journal size.

They key with this is that when you have half of it disassembled, you need to look at what the engine told you when you took it apart. Are things worn, do they look bad and use that to determine what else you may need to do. Sometimes, fixing it back up without fixing it all the way will cost you more time and money down the road, but it's everyone's choice at how much money and time they have to fix the motor.

[hippiehulahooper]

The cylinder still may not have lip to it. If it was overheated pretty bad, the tension could have come out of the rings and simply the aren't holding much pressure to the cylinder walls anymore. It may or may not have a ridge. You will need the upper end gaskets as well. Depending on mileage, new timing belt and tensioner too. Hagar talks about honing the cylinders with the block in the car, but somehow you do need to clean up all the leftover metal pieces in the motor before you reassemble.

I did the timing belt less than a year ago so less then 10,000 on it.
upper end gaskets? like valve cover?
yeah that older rering tutorial talked of honing/ deglazing with the block in the car and plenty of oil to wash out the metal.

If your pistons are standard size and the bores aren't too worn, then you would use standard size rings to go with the pistons. The bearings will need to be sized to the crank, if it's undersized already or standard size. No matter what size it is, plastigage it to make sure the clearances are within tolerance, or you should get the crank turned and use the correct sized bearings for the new journal size.

no idea what size the pistons are.
so they crank could have been turn to a smaller size.
plastigage:http://www.team-integra.net/sections/ar ... cleID=1213

They key with this is that when you have half of it disassembled, you need to look at what the engine told you when you took it apart. Are things worn, do they look bad and use that to determine what else you may need to do. Sometimes, fixing it back up without fixing it all the way will cost you more time and money down the road, but it's everyone's choice at how much money and time they have to fix the motor.

I still have the 86 td that I wanted to pull and rebuild.
I thought the rings would go with the low comprssion numbers it had but I wasn't expecting this before the 86 rebuild.
I wonder what the time and price differnce would be between a under the hood job vs total teardown and rebuild?

[82vdub]

You would have to essentially have the head off to verify if the pistons in it have any oversize stamped on them, and still, best to measure the cylinder bore diameter and taper. The same with the crank journal sizes, you have to have the rods off to figure out what you're dealing with.

This engine rebuilding is sort of a catch 22 situation. You pull the motor, disassemble to re-ring it, and you find the cylinders are worn. Do you bore and use new pistons? Good question. Then, you find that this is worn, that's worn and then you find yourself rebuilding the whole thing. The problem is that until you start, you don't fully know what all it will need, until you disassemble it. But, by that time, to even partially put it back together, you already got a lot of time and money into the work, so you either need to pull the plug and do the whole thing, or try to get by with as little as you can. Unfortunately, you won't know this until you take it apart to know what it all needs. I deal with this all the time with people that want to re-ring the engine. So, they get standard size parts for everything, find out it's already been bored over, so the parts they got need to be returned and they need to do more work to the engine to get it within spec.

[hippiehulahooper]

You would have to essentially have the head off to verify if the pistons in it have any oversize stamped on them, and still, best to measure the cylinder bore diameter and taper. The same with the crank journal sizes, you have to have the rods off to figure out what you're dealing with.

This engine rebuilding is sort of a catch 22 situation. You pull the motor, disassemble to re-ring it, and you find the cylinders are worn. Do you bore and use new pistons? Good question. Then, you find that this is worn, that's worn and then you find yourself rebuilding the whole thing. The problem is that until you start, you don't fully know what all it will need, until you disassemble it. But, by that time, to even partially put it back together, you already got a lot of time and money into the work, so you either need to pull the plug and do the whole thing, or try to get by with as little as you can. Unfortunately, you won't know this until you take it apart to know what it all needs. I deal with this all the time with people that want to re-ring the engine. So, they get standard size parts for everything, find out it's already been bored over, so the parts they got need to be returned and they need to do more work to the engine to get it within spec.

so basically take the head off and go from there with pics and questions?

[Green79]

Here's a bit of my humble advice: if you're considering honing the cylinders, and re-ringing, check a couple other things before even pulling the head:

1) Check the intermediate shaft bearings. If they're bad, it's best to pull the engine to fix them.
2) Check the main and rod bearings. If any of them got hot and have worn the journals, it would be best to pull the engine and have the crank cleaned up.

You can check those two areas relatively easily, without really a whole lot of effort (once again, relatively speaking). If all the bearings look good, then you can consider honing with the block in the car. I'm sure it's possible to do it with the block in the car (although it might be a lot of trouble, given that your chances of having leftover crud in the engine are certainly higher than with the block out of the car).

If you do indeed need to pull the engine for either of the above two items, then it would be best to take care of the other items which either MUST be done with the engine out or which are very difficult to do with the engine in the car, whether they appear to need it or not. Such as:
1) Rear main seal,
2) Clutch (depending on miles on it)
3) Hone/bore cylinders (obviously boring would mean a few additional items as well)
4) Crank polish
5) I-shaft bearings

If you really want to skimp, most other things can be done with the engine still in the car, although there are a multitude of parts which *should* be addressed if you have the engine out.

Again, this is my humble advice... anyone feel free to correct me if I've missed something. I'm fairly new to VW diesels, and I am (hopefully) finishing up a rebuild in which I took some poor shortcuts the first time around, and ended up paying for it by having to pull the engine again, and do a complete tear down (I needed to have the bottom end align-bored, among other things).

Good luck.

[82vdub]

I agree with Green79. The hardest part about trying to hone the cylinders while the block is in the car is that you will have to remove the crank, or somehow keep the metal pieces off it. So, that means you'll have to remove the transmission to get the crank out. By that time, might as well pull the whole motor so you're working on it where it's easy, instead of laying on your back or hanging over the hood of the car. Like I said, you need to let the motor tell you all what it needs to be put back together properly. Or, maybe you do as I did, keep dumping oil into it for a while. Back when this happened, oil was much cheaper than it is now though. I would literally pull off the side of the road to a parking lot, open the hood, and dump a quart in, close the hood and off I go. It got so regular that I didn't even need to check the dipstick, I just watched the odometer.

[Quantum-man]

just drove over 900 miles round trip. I just changed the oil before the trip.
on the way back the bar gauge started fluctuating from 2.5 to 3.5 back and for fairly rapidly with no change in foot pressure on the accelorator and grade of slope. then buzzer came on when turning curve. so I pulled over and filled with oil. registered 4 bar and held at about 3 3/4 bar for 140 miles then 10 miles before the house it started doing it again. fluctuating between 2.5 and 3.5 quickly as if I was pushing in on the throttle.

slowed down just before home for curve and buzzer went off on curve as I slowed down and bar went down.

got home checked oil and not registering on the stick. where did it go.

coolant looks clean.
no excessive oil on the pan or around the valve cover.

has been using oil since I got it.

does this indicate that the bearing or rings needs to be redone?

at a loss here at the moment.

Check compression. Compare new results with your old ones.
Check head oil pressure for a general picture of bearing condition, or possibly oil pump wear.
Maybe the oil scraper rings are knackered.
Do you see the oil burning out the back?
Could be just valve stem seals duff...

[hippiehulahooper]

Check compression. Compare new results with your old ones.
Check head oil pressure for a general picture of bearing condition, or possibly oil pump wear.
Maybe the oil scraper rings are knackered.
Do you see the oil burning out the back?
Could be just valve stem seals duff...

I'll check compression.
Head oil pressure, meaning head sender to 5 bar gauge?
knackered: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A knacker is a person in the trade of rendering animals that are unfit for human consumption, such as horses that can no longer work. This leads to the slang expression "knackered" meaning very tired, or "ready for the knacker’s yard", where old horses are slaughtered and made into dog food and glue. A knacker's yard or knackery is where this takes place, as opposed to a slaughterhouse, where animals are slaughtered for human food.

Use of term
The term is used in this literal sense in British English and Irish English, and gained some notoriety during the outbreak of mad cow disease (BSE) in the United Kingdom. The Slaughterhouses Act 1974, the Meat (Sterilisation and Staining) Regulations 1982 and the Food Act 1984 all have a definition of a 'knacker's yard' as "any premises used in connection with the business of slaughtering, skinning or cutting up animals whose flesh is not intended for human consumption".

The remains are often used for pet food products or certain fertilizers. The kinds of animal processing which can occur at knackeries are defined by law, for example, in Australia by the Commonwealth Meat Inspection Act 1983.

Slang
"Knackered" meaning tired, exhausted or broken in British and Irish slang is still commonly used in the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom. "Knackers" is also British/Australasian slang for testicles.

so you are saying my rings might be testicles?
britain/england is what I called it when I visited in 98. beautiful greens, greys and blues. terrible food though I did london, nottingham, and cornwall. great train system, at least compared to where I am from.

"oil burning out the back" would that be blue-grey out the exhaust? I have to check. was just black before.
valve stem seals were supposed to be done when head was done pregasket . But I wasn't there when the head shop did it.