Burning oil at an alarming rate..., and yes I searched Options

[blu94gt]

So lately my car has been losing oil, I've been putting in about a quart a month to keep it topped off. No leaks anywhere other than a little oil in the spark plug tubes, but that's pretty much leftover from when I changed my valve cover gasket. No blue smoke either. Now I've been putting in a quart every 3 weeks or so, and it seems like it's going faster. Just did a compression test, was 150-160 psi on all cylinders. I've seen a lot of 5sfe's with valve seals going bad, and have replaced piston rings on other cars for burning oil.

Any input?

Car is my 99 GT btw, bone-stock 5sfe.

[GriffGirl]

valve seals

[hurley97]

Valve seals would cause some blue-ish smoke on cold start.

The amount of time really has nothing to do with anything unless you were leaking oil, how may miles do you go before you have to add a qt? How many miles are on the car already? Its normal for any Toyota with over 100k on it to burn about 1qt every 2-3k miles.

If you think you are going through an excessive amount of oil, it has to be going somewhere. Whether it's leaking or burning it, you'll see either oil in the bay or smoke out of the exhaust but it won't just disappear without any signs.

And (depending on the mileage of course) one qt every 3-4wks isn't really an alarming rate, to me anyway. There was a point when my original engine was around 190k that it was going through about 3qts every 4 days or so, that's a pretty alarming rate.

This post has been edited by hurley97: Jun 5, 2009 - 3:14 PM

[blu94gt]

Well I had my neighbor look at it, some blue smoke on startup and if you gun it from idle, but I've seen much worse. Some seepage around the timing cover and oil pan but nothing actually leaking, my Maxima drips all over the place and doesn't even get to the low point on the dipstick between changes.

Car has 147k on it, right now I'm driving about 40 miles a day, used to be doing about 130 a day commute with school and work and will start that again in the fall. It's definitely more than 1 qt every 2-3k miles, but not like hurley97's 3qts in a 4 day period lol.

If it's valves I don't know if I'll try to do it myself, or just send it to the machine shop nearby for a full valve job, head grind, polish, etc (and maybe send my cams off to Webcams...hmmm). It's no problem for the car to be down and out for a few days. If it's piston rings, I'll do a whole bottom end rebuild and maybe some new pistons/rods for a little umph, maybe as supporting mods for future work.

[soulshadow]

Oil pump seal going bad, and rear main seal going bad. You have not seen anything yet until you have to put in 4 qts of oil every morning.

[Salica]

Dude that does not sound bad at all!!

My car is currently going through 1qurt every 3 days but im just not driving the car as much til i get some money to change the gasket. On my car its the gasket where the belts are (sorry bout not knowing the name of the seal) . I looked down there and realized that it was only spilling when the car was running.