Valve Stem Seals - Possible "Short Term" Fix

[IslandRoad]

Before I get down to saying this will fix all your problems, this only worked for me. I still feel the real solution is having your Valve stem seals replaced but that's at a big expense and maybe this will work for you as it did for me (So far).

So I bought my car about 7 months ago without knowing the history. I had oil leaks all over the place, and turned out that my car-timing was off as well. I brought it to a reputable BMW performance shop and they replaced all the VC seals, upper and upper and lower timing covers ect ect basically all the rubber on the top along with adjusting the cams. I no longer have any oil leaks but they were curious as to why the Cams needed to be re-timed. They figured because somebody was in there doing valve-guide seals since the car showed no signs of any smoke at all. Great i got everything fixed and turned out dodged a major failure point for these cars... or so I thought.

After driving a week I noticed some smoke out the tail pipes whenever I came to a complete stock and then acceleration. Turns out I had the Valve stem seals issue. I talked to my shop that did the work and they said now that all the gaskets have been replaced and I am getting proper vacuum in the engine is showing where it was probably was leaking prior.

I started searching on how this worked and why they went bad. Turns out the rubber gets hard over time allowing oil to slip past and be burnt up. That's when i started looking into oil additives.

Car - 2006 BMW X5 4.4i

Step 1 - Changed oil with Rotella T6 5w40 - I run this in my 570WHP 335i and 550AWHP 535xiT wagon with great results. (I don't care what oil you use, and that it says for diesels ect ect. This is not a oil debate thread this is what just used in my car, use what you want)



Step 2 - Added 2 bottles of Locus Oil Stop leak. While doing the oil change I also added 2 bottles of Lucas Oil Stop leak. I make sure that when I put this is, I was not overfilling the oil so I used less Rotella T6 to meet the recommended oil quantity.

At this point I drove around for about a week and did not really see much of a change at all to the smoke. I was a little disappointed but did not have that much faith in the Lucas oil even though the reviews were great. This lead me to keep searching and on to
step 3.



Step 3 - Added 2 bottles of ATP AT-205 Re-Seal Stops Leaks, 8 Ounce Bottle. First thing that came to my mind was "Snake Oil" but than I started researching this stuff and found the reviews amazing. I found across a thread on here were one guy put this in his car and also helped him. I did some more research and decided it was worth a try. 1 bottle is good to support up to 6 cylinders, I decided not to chance anything and just put in both bottles. I did not drain any oil prior to doing this.

The manufacturer says to drive the car up to 5 hours to start seeing results, it took about 8 hours of driving for me to really notice a difference. As it stands now I have about 10 hours on the car with the ATP AT-205 and the smoking issues has all but gone away. I am always checking in my rear-view to see if this is the case and last week had somebody follow me doing pulls and stop and goes to confirm the smoke has gone.

Again I just wanted to share this in hopes it can help somebody else as it did with my car. I don't know if this is going to be a long term solution or not but we will see. If you have any questions let me know, I ordered the ATP from amazon. I can't say if it was the combination of Lacus with APT but thought i would throw that in here in-cause somebody want to try as well. When I go to do a new oil change, I am going to use Rotella T6 and only 1 bottle of ATP and 1 bottle of Lacus this time just to make sure everything still seals why chance it. If the issue does come back I will update with the results.