Oil Pan gasket fun + Oil burning update

Let the games begin

Alrighty so last week I finally decided to tackle my oil pan gasket. It was leaking pretty good and ever since I did my transmission swap and replaced the rear main seal she burned a F%$K ton of oil (approximation not exact). In summary I did a compression test and a leak down test and everything was fine compression was good so where the oil was getting in I have no idea. If you read through any of my previous posts I was just about ready to give up on my motor with now 176k miles. For the holidays I drove from Florida to Ohio and back in total about 2500 miles and I used 10qts of oil…. WTF. I had to do something about it. SOOOOOO I figured the best option and the only option I had left was to replace the gasket since it was leaking and possibly somehow it was causing a vacuum leak in the bottom end and causing the oil on the walls to get sucked into the combustion chamber. As far as changing the gasket I just followed the procedures in the Bentley manual and YouTube, which was pretty easy and straight forward. The old gasket was as you guessed it was toast and fell into about 150,000,000 pieces as soon as I pulled the pan. The bottom end looked fine and my Oil pump nut looked fine I know these are known to have issues but I’m sure it’ll be fine. Got on the new gasket which was annoying due to the fact that the pan isn’t level due to the cant angle of the engine, but with an extra helping hand I got it in place.

Dropped sub-frame and pan

While I had everything pulled apart I also decided to change the front crank seal, because why not right? If my theory of bottom end vacuum leak= massive oil consumption might as well change out the only other seal that could possibly be leaking air and oil. This seal was actually really easy to change the crank pulley was on damn tight, but it was no match for breaker bar+ jack handle. The crank pulley came right off and the seal was pretty easy to pop out and press in the new one. So new oil pan gasket plus a new front crank seal, and yet I still had one new oil leak that I caused to fix…. So back in December I also decided to replace my VANOS seals (yo), why? Because they had 176k miles and why not. Everything went smoothly until I went to tighten back the stupid little 10mm nuts back on the studs. Of course my stupid a$$ wayyyyy over-tightened them because they never really felt tight so of course I snapped off a stud…. F&%K me right…. SOOOOO I decided to just see if I could get away without replacing the stud and the new gasket would seal, but as it turns out after my 2500mi road trip pffffttttttt no, there was oil all down the front of the motor…. Pulled the VANOS (yo) back off and managed the get the stud out with some vise grips YAY! I happened to have the right size bolt that fit in the threads and it was the right length and everything WHOOO! Mission accomplished! VANOS (yo) back in business!!!!

No VANOS yo....

SOOOOOO in conclusion so far I’ve driven about 200 miles and I must say the eye watering smokey oil clouds on start up are no longer an issue and I haven’t seen one massive poof of smoke behind me!!!! F#$K YES!!! While I had the pan and cross-member and any other splash shields out they all got the pressure washer, and so far they are all still oil free!!!! The dipstick level so far has been solid too so, If you change your rear main seal and you oil pan gasket is 17 years old CHANGE IT TOO!!!!! And you might as well just change all the gaskets because you know what our lovely modern BMWs are getting old!!!! Unless you too want to burn 1qt of oil every 200 miles…. ;)

Thanks for reading this far and following along on my stupid adventure :)