Hey there,

First off, thanks for any help you can give me in advance, I hope you are patient bc I'm a noob with Audis. I have experience on other motors, but this is certainly a new area for me.

Here's the scoop:

I picked up a 2000 a4 2.8 (30v) with 140,000 for around $2500. Car seems great but I think its eating oil. When I first start it up, nothing, but as it warms up it starts to smoke (just a little bit) from the exhaust. I am not getting any fluctuations in the idle, no sputtering, and its not overheating - everything seems fine but for a lil smoke. ive run it at idle for over an hour. I can update with a pic of the amount and color of smoke when i get home from work.

I want to treat it to a new timing belt, water pump, thermo, etc (basically the kit from ECS) and I was going to replace the valve gaskets, cam seals, etc as well to try and resolve the smoke - but I am curious if I should bother with the head gasket as well. do you think that replacing the valve gaskets will even help with the smoke?

ive been researching and it could also be a bad pcv valve. it doesnt appear to be leaking onto my driveway, so it seems that its internal at this point. the only thing unique is that it wont smoke at all until it's warmed up.


I cant really find any information on whether or not the HGs tend to go bad in the 2.8. Some sources say that they can live in excess of 20 years, but in my wife's STi we had to replace her HG at around 100k.

thanks a lot

 

when mine starts to smoke usually about every 2500 miles i take the pcv hoses off and blow all the oil out. that pretty much gets rid of the smoke coming out of my exhaust till the next 2500 miles when i repeat the process.

 

The first thing I would do is find out where the oil is coming from before you blow a bunch of money on timing belt etc etc. I would pull out all of the sparkplugs and see which one's are covered in oil. The next easiest (and cheapest) thing to do would be to replace the seal around that cylinder with the oily spark plug. If that fixes the problem, then great. If not then you will have to start looking elsewhere. If all else fails, you can get another engine, 2.8L are cheap and easy to get.

 

Well I've already committed to replacing the timing belt/water pump since its about time for that as maintenance anyway. I also have all the valve/cam gaskets being replaced as well. My friend's dad wants to seafoam it as well - since it's basically new to us and want to have a "clean base"

I'll be working on it tonight mostly and I'll take note of which (if any) of the plugs is swimming in oil - meaning that it's likely the gasket on that cylinder was the culprit.

I'm also going to clean out the pcv hoses as recommended, I dont see how it could hurt.

If any of the above works, I'll be sure to post my findings in case anyone else experiences this sort of scenario.

 

Good luck. I really really hope it doesn't end up being a piston ring. That would suck putting all of that work into the engine and end up with that :/

 

yea i totally agree. if it is a piston ring i might just drive it into a tree.

My first step is to run a compression test on each cylinder. crossing my fingers of course...