Oil Filter Grenades III - Filter Strikes Back

[S N 3 A K Y]

G'day, recently i had problems revolving around my mates engine dumping it's oil on my nice driveway. I've pulled the engine out after consulting professional advice and the advice from people here on this site.

Basically the engine would spew it's whole sump-full of oil for no apparent reason. 3 times it spat it from the gasket on three oil filters, and 1 time it surged it's way up and spewed out the breather hole on the rocker cover.
I assumed it wasn't a blow-by problem due to the symptoms of it not doing it all the time, and 2 compression tests came up with satisfactory results. As well as this, the engine seemed to blow virtually no smoke at all.

It ended up being as some pointed out here - an oil pump related problem of the pressure relief valve not being able to contain the pressure at certain times. Start-up was the major problem area for it, start the engine and it would not be able to contain the initial pressure jolt. Every now and then the releif valve would do it's job and you could start and drive the vehicle, but not all the time.
Upon inspection of the dismantled pump, it was obvious that the spring was stuffed, and the releif valve itself had a reasonable amount of wear around it's seat and body.

This more than anything is a bit of advice for people that have similar symptoms of reasonable compression, no smoke from the exhaust and yet oil dumping itself. Either by blowing through the gasket on the oil filter, or surging out of the breather hole on the rocker cover, or squirting out through the rocker cover gasket at an unusually high pressure, without the symptoms of blow-by.



S N 3 A K Y