Where's my oil going?

[Siggy]

Originally Posted by Russianblue

lots of youtube on the CCV replacement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btggLSedkxc

I wouldn't be surprised if the residue you saw was power steering fluid. it's possibly leaking at the bottom of the reservoir and running down the hose to the steering box. Cheap and easy fix.

and DITTO on the bits in the pan, lol! I find stuff down there every time I take it off!

Yeah, I saw that video. I wanted to take the intake off, not try to work under it. It looks like his didn't have the cold weather kit on it. With the cold weather kit, you almost have to beat the thing in with a dead blow hammer to get it to get it into position and the cold weather insulation on it seems a little thick around the outlet tubes so I couldn't get any of the hoses to snap into place without trimming a little away around the outlet tubes. I would have been in a mental institution if I had tried to get those hoses on while still on the car.

One thing that really impressed me was seeing the tops of the valves when I took the intake off. They looked fantastic. Not one of them had any carbon built up on them. They almost looked like new. That gave me some comfort about my engine in general.

On an interesting tangent, we're all complaining about the oil usage on our e53's, I'm looking at some 7 Series cars and found a thread about BMW losing a class action lawsuit for the excessive consumption on their 7 Series V-8 engines. You have to take you car in and they start the process of monitoring your oil usage. Once you hit a certain number of miles, they look at it again. If it falls in the range of the lawsuit, then they'll replace your entire engine. Only issue is that you have to pay for a percentage of it. Cars with about 100,000 miles seem to have to pay about 40% of the bill, which is working out to be about $6,000.

The oil usage seems to be about 1 qt for every 1000 miles and that qualifies for the engine replacement. Seems like this isn't limited to the e53 3.0 engines we have in our X5's.