Quote:
Originally Posted by jojo-munson
But a second component to the oil leak was from spark plugs on the passenger side. Numbers 8 and 6 wires were wet with oil, and it was dripping down the engine. That was weird I thought, so I pulled the plugs. Number 8 was barely even hand tight, I wouldn't have needed a wrench at all to get it out. The rest of the spark plugs were tighter.
You can see in the pic below, #8 was reeeaaal bad. These are Delco r44lts plugs by the way. I'm hoping that I just hadn't tightened that plug enough originally, so there was sub-par compression and oil was leaking out around it.
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That plug is oil fouled. Oil in the cylinder is not caused by insufficient torque on the plug seat. You have a broken ring land on the piston, bad scraper ring, bad valve seal or other issue. A leakdown test should point out what is the issue.
Also....
Its a bad idea to run shorter plugs than the head is designed for. If this was a high performance engine you could get detonation due to hot spots from the exposed threads (*ok, not really a factor here but....). It will also gum up or damage the exposed threads, will LOWER compression ratio and wont run well.
If I had to guess Id wager all of the problems you are having with this motor would be solved if the heads were rebuilt....but new spark plugs will NEVER solve what caused #8 to look like that.
My advice is to get or borrow a leakdown tester and find out if the oil is coming from the bottom or the top and fix the reason oil is getting in the hole.
~JH