PCPaul wrote:
On Sun, 11 May 2008 10:20:18 +0100, David Jones wrote:


He did talk about billowing smoke, not in the op but in his reply to me.
Sounds a bit ropy to me:

Hi Dave, yeah mine is at the worse stage i think. smoke bellowing out
of bonnet when driving. Major stains on driveway and having to put a
litre of
oil every couple of days. could be garage or scrap man even !!


Possibly not as bad as it sounds - when mine went the oil dripped
directly onto the exhaust manifold. So the smoke was being generated
outside the engine, not quite such a sign of ropiness..

Mine was retightened (and a couple of 'wrong size' bolts replaced) and
the smoke/drip went away. Until next time it started dripping, which was
just the oil filter getting a stone through it..

You could be right. I was wondiring, with this talk of "some kind of
"gunk" (like a slightly spongy silicone)" if you could just lossen the
bolts, squeeze some gunk into the gap and then tighten them up again
(assuming the gasket was the problem, not the tightness of the bolts).
It seems to me that the difficult thing would be reattaching the exhast
after removing it to get the sump off completely.