On Sun, 11 May 2008 10:53:27 +0100, David Jones wrote:

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.

I would guess it's only the downpipe/cat section that needs removing, so
thats not too bad compared to the whole manifold. I haven't done it
though, I've only had the exhaust off from the cat back.

The HBOL suggests you need to lift the engine a few inches to get the
sump off completely... I'd definitely go for tightening the bolts first!

Also, as has been said, it might well be worth using chemical metal and
not doing a showroom condition gasket replacement since the problem is
minor (but annoying) and the fix is very time consuming and disturbs a
lot of bits that might then suffer (e.g. AFAICS you disturb the water
pump and belts on blacktop engines so they are probably worth replacing
while you're in there, etc. etc.)