Oil Seperator, Burnt Oil Smell
 

The other day I was driving home and it was very cold out, -14 degrees. I saw excess smoke coming out of the exhaust when I got home. I turned the car off and checked under the hood and their was oil surrounding the oil cap. I checked the oil for water because I was concerned it was a blown head gasket, and the oil had no water in it. I then read about the oil separator valve and the valve cover gaskets. I could smell the oil in the exhaust when it was running. So I spent about 5-6 Hours and I replaced the oil separator and both valve cover gaskets. When I was taking the valve covers off I noticed that the drivers side cover seemed to be the one that was leaking. As a side note It didn't seem as though very much oil was sitting on the spark plugs or in the bay area with the spark plugs. When I went to fire the X5 (4.4) back up it was still burning quite a bit of oil. Now this slowly went away (30 mins or so) and I have only put 150 miles on it since the repair. Before it was bellowing of burnt oil and now I can only catch a small hint of bunt oil via smell. My question is how long does it take for the oil smell to go away? Is their something else I could be missing? Also I had to replace the spark plugs because they seemed to be fouled from burning so much oil. Now it seems to be running pretty well. When the plugs were fouling I received a p1345 error code so that's what made me decide to replace the plugs.

The smell will take a week or more to go away..I wondered the same thing when this happened to me. its the old oil that spilled everywhere from the initial incident. You should be fine, just give it some time the smell will go away...

To the original poster, what model do you have, engine size, etc. and what is the date of production?

Its an 2001 4.4, im not sure what the month of production is.

Sounds like you have an M62 engine. When you replaced the oil separator, did you also install the heated wraps, etc. There is a pretty involved procedure for the M62 for this fix. The other X5 engines have easier fixes.

Headed wraps, Im not sure what that is. Can you tell me what headed wraps are?

He means heated wraps. Its actually insulated parts for the new updated oil seperator design..

Look here http://www.xoutpost.com/x5-e53-forum/...need-help.html post #16.

I think it applies to only 6 cylinder 3.0 engine. I haven't heard any updated parts for 4.4 engine.

To OP, I would suggest you to do a compression test. The compression test gauge is cheap and you may even be able to rent it from autozone.

Not true...There are updated insulated parts for the V8 engine as well. They have the same problem..

I'd love to know if there is an updated parts for 4.4 engine. when I did mine, the parts guy told me there is no updated parts and all you can do is to replace them if it fails again. :(