I found oil in my spark plug holes recently but understand this is probably not serious. I have not done a compression check, but the engine feels like its' running pretty strong at 124,000 miles. Plugs were very clean.

I bought the valve cover gasket kit and found the main gasket, the individual spark plug gaskets, and four o-rings about an inch in diameter in the kit. Where do the o-rings go? My Haynes manual doesn't say anything about them and when I took off the valve cover I didn't see old ones anywhere.

Also Haynes did not say what the torque should be on the valve cover nuts? Can someone clue me in or direct me to previous posts on these items?

Car is a 1990 Accord LX, 5-speed, getting good mileage and using no oil between changes at 3500 mile intervals.

Thank you.


Modified by himes at 10:26 AM 8/30/2004

 

Maybe you're talking about the O-rings that go down underneath the cam caps (#19)? I guess they can also leak oil into the spark plug tubes.


edit... The cam caps don't have numbers 'cause they're not available separately. They're the top half of each camshaft bearing journal, shown over in the left of the picture. Not too horrobly difficult, but certainly a bigger job than the valve cover. Putting the VC gasket on is easy, so if you have to take it off again to do those lower O-rings it's not a horrible waste.

I don't remember the torque for the VC hold-down nuts, but it's pretty low. Those studs are easy to break.


Modified by JimBlake at 3:41 PM 8/30/2004

 

Kinda looks like getting into where those go is considerably more effort. Not sure exactly what the cam caps are, but guess that cam disassembly would be required to replace those o-rings.

 

One of those O-rings was leaking on my car.

What you have to do is remove the rocker arm assembly. The O-rings go under there.

Its not hard but you have to remove the bolts in a sequence, and torque them back in a sequence so keep that in mind.

Also when putting the assembly back together make sure all the rocker arms are up on top of the valves...you'll see what I mean when you do it.

 

Those O-Rings under the rocker arms, are those what cause oil to seep into the spark plug holes? Or can I get away with just replacing the spark plug tube seals?