My car uses alot of oil. Once the engine is warm and I'm sitting still at a light, even for just 10 seconds, accelerating causes a pretty noticeable puff of smoke to come out, accelerating hard also causes it. I think its the valve seals. Anyone know how much that would cost to fix? Car has 112k miles. I'm using mobil1 euro formula 5w-40 and its worse with this than it was when I was using mobil1 5w-30 high mileage oil.

 

I replaced the seals with timing chain myself and cost was around $500 including all special tools.
That being said, if you do it at shop, I guess around 1500 to 2000?

 

I think I spent $570 on tools alone. Probably another $500 on parts but I did the timing chain at the same time. It had 60,000 miles and probably didn’t need the timing chain. A lot of the cost was the chain, chain guides, crank seal, and seal installer tool. Also the valvotronic spring tool was expensive but the modified screwdriver probably would work as well.

I’m retired and probably spent three lazy days on this but a shop might do it very quickly.

Peter

 

I've had my head rebuilt by my machinist only thing I dropped of was the valve seals and if the head had a burnt valve......
It cost me $275.....

 

How many miles did yours have and what were the symptoms? I emailed 3 places and only one wrote back to me, they estimated $7500, yikes.

Why did the valve seals need replacing so early? Or is 60k normal lifespan of them? Do valve seals go bad in most cars at that mileage, or is this a mini thing? What were your symptoms?

 

The Mini used a lot of oil and I figured that was valve guides.

However, with the Valvotronic, the intake vacuum isn’t quite so strong so I may have miscalculated the issue, (not so high a vacuum at idle like a normal car engine). As it is, the oil consumption has reduced somewhat but I’ve not measured its full effect.

Peter

 

Mine was at 160,000km, so roughly 100,000 miles.
As far as timing chain goes, there were no symptoms. The car drove fine without any CEL. But once I opened it up, the guides were already broken inside. I was VERY glad I did this before it the chain blows up.

For the valve stem seals, the engine was burning oil. I didn't measure how much, but was burning a lot.
After some googling, it seems to be the most common culprit is the valve stem seals, and since I was going to replace the timing chain guide, might as well do both at the same time.

Wow... $7500... they seriously don't want to do the job.

https://www.northamericanmotoring.co...stem-seal.html