Chevrolet... HELP!

[f_399]

I was driving and noticed everytime i stop the car revs high

I went to a parking lot, put it on Neutral and it revved all the way to 2,000 RPM... it goes down to 1,500 when it is engaged in a gear (Driive, Reverse)

I turned off the car and looked what was wrong, nothing seemed wrong, no leaks or anything...

Then I looked at the oil dip stick and it was empty! (Amsoil)

I was lucky to have extra bottles in the car and filled it up and that seemed to solve the problem

What happened and why was it revving so high?

Why am I losing so much oil? Switched to synthetic at 50,000 miles and not have 145,000

FYI: Since I bought the car with 40,000 miles i have not changed any gasket of any kind

[thestaton]

just from my experience I owned a 95 Monte Carlo for about a year and I could not afford to fix the freakin thing any more. The whole time I owned it, there was always a steady oil leak. Mine had something to do with a piston that was possibly damanged. So instead of paying for the motor to get pulled / broken down I just sold it at an auction as / is.

The other problems I had...

radiator hose broke while in a drive through causing a massive smoke screen that was hillarious when I look back on it.

the air conditioner had to be constantly refilled like 3 times a summer very furstrating. I had the pump replaced and it didnt help at all.

that was my last american made car I'll ever own ;)

[f_399]

yeah...i was a broke college student so this is all i could afford, would have wanted a japanese car

[SmaartAasSaabr]

Nothing wrong with good old GM cars. They're the best... if you want to run a vehicle for the least money, go for a old GM sedan. Parts, everywhere, and cheap as hell. They use the same parts across such a wide variety of vehicles that they made millions of, and in the scrap yard you can save major dollars compared to some Honda. Plus, the cars are pretty well screwed together and easy to repair. And they aren't too bad on gas either.

And they are cheap to buy in the first place!

Only real problem is they don't make a lot of cars with manual transmissions, and the ones they do actually hold their value very well (Corvette, Firebird) or they are just too slow and have crappy seats (Cavalier).

The newer GM cars seem to be much better on the "crappy seat" and slowness problems on the cheap cars too. And the Corvette is the best bang for the buck on the market today. A Ferrari 575M for less than a Boxster :D With Honda gas milage...


Anyway back to your issues f_399, you likely had an oil leak. If you always park in the same spot, check for a big black stain or something. I'd check your oil level every morning before you fire her up for the next little while, just to make sure what you are dealing with. The RPM issue is very odd indeed, perhaps a sensor was trying to regulate something it saw with the low oil. Did you have any oil pressure warning? I think if you didn't, the issue would be that the oil was "enough" for the engine to be properly lubricated, but not enough to register on the stick. Especially if you had been just driving the car and the motor was hot (ie there was oil up on the heads and in the upper part of the motor). I wouldn't freak out about it yet. And hey, you can get another one of those 3.4 V6's for like $100 at the local U-pull! :lol:

[f_399]

thanks for the replies guys!

my uncle looked at the car and we found out the leak from the drivers side was coming from the radiator

the socket when the radiator and the radiator hose connects is leaking

went to pep boys to have them check it because they just replaced that hose....

pep boys said that the socket that connects the radiator to the hose is cracked and that is causing the leak

could this cause the car to be revving high at times?

how do i fix it? pepboys said i need a new radiator

[SmaartAasSaabr]

Let me get this straight...

PepBoys put in a new radiator hose. The radiator is leaking. The port on the radiator (plastic) is cracked and allowing coolant to pass. (not to be confused with motor oil, this is green?)

The best solution to that is to, well, replace the radiator.

But do you know why it is cracked? I bet you $20 that the idiot at Pepboys that installed that hose tightened it way too much and cracked the rad. Go down there and make them pay for that sucker!

Still, if you are leaking oil I think it is from somewhere else.

[Suf Daddy]

Here's the problem:

Unless you radiator has an oil cooler line through it these two items are separate.

Oil - engine
Coolant: Radiator.

Now you have 100K on synthetic correct?

Most engines will consume SOME oil during their oil change interval.

This will depend on what YOUR intervals are
3K , 5K , 10K?
Now a car with 100K AND MORE, WILL leak oil from the gaskets. This is from old age and normal.

HOWEVER, synthetic is usually thinner than regular (dino) oil so it can leak past seals easier.
ALSO the synthetics can eat some of the older engine gaskets so they'll seep / leak after a while.

Don't use synthetics at motor break in.
Wait for a while like 20K or so........

-Suf Daddy

[holein1]

I would try a bottle of this it really does work wonders http://auto-rx.com/
I used it in my daily driver ( old beater honda ) it had a cam seal leak and the auto-rx reconditioned the seal and stoped the leak. I put mobil 1 in my wifes honda a while back and the stuff leak through it like crazy! Went back to good old dino. What are your OCI 3,000 5,000?? if your changing your oil ever 3,000 to 4,000 miles and are't hard on the engine, you really will not benefit from a syn oil, you can get cheap $1.00 qt chevron supreme or havoline that has a ton of moly and boron and gives great UOA's #'s.


http://theoildrop.server101.com/cgi/ultimatebb.cgi Click on the link and type in auto-rx in the search engine and see what people think of auto-rx. When it comes to engine lubricants this is the best forum on the web period!

In my 03' cobra I use chevron supreme 89 cents quart and 4oz of lc20 (lube control) and the wear #'s are better than when I was running a full syn. oil!

[Suf Daddy]

Like he says, unless you wail on your motor synthetic won't help much.

If you have aturbo, synthetic is a good idea.

All Audi / VW 1.8 Turbos have changed the Oil requirement to synthetic ONLY.

People never effectively cool down a hot turbo motor after flogging it and the heat soak burns off conventional (dino) oil leaving "coking" deposits which ruin the turbo tight clearances. Additionally dirt oil builds up sludge which the 1.8T have been suffering from. People skip the maintenance on a lease vehicle and use cheap oil. There is an AOA suit and recall about 1.8T because of the manufacturer spec'd dino and 10,000 oil changes.................

-Suf Daddy

[SmaartAasSaabr]

Typically a "water-cooled" turbocharger only needs about 30 sec of "idle down" after a hard run and will be fine. Using my experiences with Saabs, typically the turbos last the life of the car. The one exception is a few Garrett units they were using in the late 1990's, as if you use a cheap petroleum-based oil and change it at the factory spec of 10 000 miles (for synthetic) they will coke and fail by 130 000 miles. I guess the difference is the older cars had shorter intervals, and the newer cars get sludged engines (again from not changing oil frequently enough and using a poor quality oil. Plus the PCV system exacerbates the situation) before the turbo can fail :lol:

I had my turbo (~150k miles) off for a while (headgasket repair) and also another turbocharger (an ancient oil cooled unit off a 1987 car with over 170 k miles) and both were very tight... original units both of them.

The problem with those "engine rebuild in a can" stuff is they are just a viscosity improver "syrup" that mixes with the oil to make it thicker, ie 10w30 to a 20w50. No wonder the engine isn't burning any more oil, there isn't any oil flowing :lol: My discussion with various people generally follows my thinking that such products aren't particularly healthy for your motor. Especially if the motor doesn't already have some serious issues (ie burning oil and no compression).

I had some fairly major rear main bearing leaks on my Chevy pickup with something like 500 000km on it, I ditched the 5w30 for some 15w40 Rotella and it doesn't leak nearly as bad (as you'd guess right?) and feels a bit better. Before, I never needed to change the oil, it had a kind of permenant fresh-oil intake and a continuous automatic rustproofing system... :lol:

[SmaartAasSaabr]

Typically a "water-cooled" turbocharger only needs about 30 sec of "idle down" after a hard run and will be fine. (it's a neat principle, some engine coolant is in teh centre section, when the car stops it boils, the expansion pushes the coolant out and siphons more cool coolant in to replace it) Using my experiences with Saabs, typically the turbos last the life of the car. The one exception is a few Garrett units they were using in the late 1990's, as if you use a cheap petroleum-based oil and change it at the factory spec of 10 000 miles (for synthetic) they will coke and fail by 130 000 miles. I guess the difference is the older cars had shorter intervals, and the newer cars get sludged engines (again from not changing oil frequently enough and using a poor quality oil. Plus the PCV system exacerbates the situation) before the turbo can fail :lol:

I had my turbo (~150k miles) off for a while (headgasket repair) and also another turbocharger (an ancient oil cooled unit off a 1987 car with over 170 k miles) and both were very tight... original units both of them.

The problem with those "engine rebuild in a can" stuff is they are just a viscosity improver "syrup" that mixes with the oil to make it thicker, ie 10w30 to a 20w50. No wonder the engine isn't burning any more oil, there isn't any oil flowing :lol: My discussion with various people generally follows my thinking that such products aren't particularly healthy for your motor. Especially if the motor doesn't already have some serious issues (ie burning oil and no compression).

I had some fairly major rear main bearing leaks on my Chevy pickup with something like 500 000km on it, I ditched the 5w30 for some 15w40 Rotella and it doesn't leak nearly as bad (as you'd guess right?) and feels a bit better. Before, I never needed to change the oil, it had a kind of permenant fresh-oil intake and a continuous automatic rustproofing system... :lol:

[Arvetus]

I had a '91 Regal with the 3.1 in it and I had a rear main leak. The only way to fix it was to pull the engine, but someone told me about Valvoline Max-life oil, so I started using that. It isn't fully synthetic, but I believe they do have a full synthetic version of the Max-life if you prefer that. Anyway...the Valvoline Max-life has some sort of thing in it that helps condition old seals and after I started using that oil, no more rear main leak. And those 3100 engines will run practically forever. Not much beats the GM 3800 and 3100 pushrod engines.

I recently switched from regular oil to Valvoline Max-life oil on my Impala after rolling over 75k.

As far as why the engine is running funny....did you (or anyone else) disconnect your battery for anything? If the battery was disconnected, and you have the 3100 engine (which if your car is that lumina, then I believe that's what motor is in that car), what happens is that the idle speed is controlled by the computer. Once you disconnect the battery, the computer looses everything and now the engine doesn't know where to idle. You can take it to a dealer and have them "re-learn" the idle, or you can let it run rough like that for about a week and it will re-learn itself.

Not sure if that's what's going on, but it's just a possiblilty if that battery was disconnected.

[Won Hunglo]

Year make model?

[f_399]

97 lumina ltz 3100

[aust3333]

F_399, sounds like a vacuum leak to me. I know everyone is talking oil and such but those particular Chevy's are known for vacuum leaks. An easy fix if you can just find where it is coming from. Hope this helps.