Date:         Thu, 26 Feb 1998 15:18:05 -0800
Reply-To:     David Bayer <bayer@SYBASE.COM>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <Vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:         David Bayer <bayer@SYBASE.COM>
Subject:      Oil coming out odd places
Comments: To: vanagon@vanagon.com

Hello-
        Last night while down home, my 87 syncro lost power to point of
putting along. This prompted me to quickly pull off the road and into a
parking lot. I was unsuccessful at attempting to get the engine to get some
power back (both last night and this afternoon), but I found a few
interesting (though very grim) things out.

1) pulling the wires off 1&3 didn't change the running of the engine though
        they were getting good spark. Didn't have a compression tester
        to look at this further but:

2) Oil is seeping out of the exhaust flange on #3. And further down at the
        couple of flanges in the exhaust system.

I know this means that I have some major work ahead of me, and am trying to
determine what the best place to get the van towed - in order to make that
decision, I need to figure out a little bit more about what is wrong in
#3. Has anyone seen this kind of behavior before? I just had the heads
machined two months ago - when doing that I saw that #3 had a small (just
visible) nick running longitudality <spelling> up and down that cylinder
(but since it was there before I removed the heads I didn't think too much
about it as #3 has always had good compression - bad assumption I realize).

Is there anyway to clean the oil that has run down my exhaust pipes out
without killing the pipes (I hope it hasn't fouled the cat already)?

Anyway, any thoughts on causes or determining them would be of great help.
TIA.

dave