Car is burning oil.. puff of blue smoke

Hi there,

My car has a turbo back exhaust and was tuned by SS.

Not sure if this is related to the tuning or anything but I have found that occassionally I will see a puff of blue smoke from the exhaust and then nothing.. Then nothing and then a few days later same thing will happen. When I took it to SOG for my regular oil service this week, the guy there mentioned that it is probably burning oil but without performing a compression/leak down test, there was no way to tell. I don't think it is burning much oil because I check the oil levels and have not had to top it off or anything.

Questions are:
1) What do you guys think it may be?
2) How much does it cost to test and then fix? I know it depends on what we find..
3) Any other suggestions?

Am open to discussion.. Thank you..

 

Probably valve seals. Could be the oil seal on the turbo too. The turbo seals are known to go out but its usually the water jacket that gives out (two local cars did this).

 

Do a compression test and see what it says....super easy to do. What year is your WRX? If 02-05 compression should be around 150-155 psi iirc.

 

could be this could be that, we could sit here and guess all day but until you have it traced down by a mechanic, we are all just guessing

 

Compression test results

Hello - okay, so I finally managed to geta compression test done for my car (I don't know much about cars so please use dummy lingo with me). According to the compression test, everything checked out OK and all cylinders were 155psi.. As a result, I still do not know what is causing the blue smoke and am still trying to chase it down. Do you guys think it may be the tune? The tune was done by SS a few years back.

Any other thoughts?

 

Probably blow through. Do you have an oil catch can?

 

Tunes don't cause oil smoke, unless you have broken a ringland.

There are really only a couple of things it could be.

1. Valve Stem seals, these usually only smoke on start up, can't be replaced without pulling the engine.

2. Broken Ringland, on a 05 wrx this is very likely as well. These usually don't show up on a compression test because just the ringland is broken the ring is usually still in place.

3. PCV valve, it could be sucking oil back into the intake, but if its just one puff and its not using much oil this probably isn't it.

4. Turbo seals, again usually they use quite a bit of oil if the seals are going out.


So its more likely 1 or 2

 

I know that a compression test will for sure tell you if you have a cracked ringland on the GR STi's. Why is it different for the 05 WRX?

 

Thats not correct. It depends on how bad its broken, just because its cracked doesn't mean the ring isn't in place and making compression.

I've had engines come in that when they were compression tested show them as perfect and they had broken ringlands on all 4 cylinders.

 

could try a leak down test, they have a better history of showing if ringlands are busted.

Dummy lingo - it's a compression test, only run in reverse. You introduce compressed air into the cylinder and you see if the cylinder can hold pressure.

 

take a bore scope to the plug holes and have a look. I've seen a 2" section blown out and still hold compression because the rings were holding the ring land in place. Cylinder wall was polished where the land had rubbed the cross hatching down so it was obvious.

I know Ball has/had a scope and sure Brandon@Allpro will have one as well.