What happened to this valve seal?
 

#2 has been burning oil for a while, bad enough to foul a plug if left idling too long. After shutdown the sparkplug was wet with oil on the intake side. It would smoke on a cold start, and you could smell oil burning after overrun to a stop. Sounded like a valve seal to me, so I pulled the intake seals on #2 to have a look, and this is what I found:

http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a3...1000000104.jpg

The one I removed is on the top, and the new one is at the bottom. At first I thought maybe I bent it removing it, but after taking a closer look, all of the valve seals on the motor seemed to be 'crimped' this way. It's a FM head, but I know the previous owner had a trick new ferrea valvetrain installed. The second one I took of looked the same except some of the rubber inside was torn too (again, not sure that I didn't somehow damage it during removal). Is this some method of keeping the seals on that I've never heard of (do they pop off on these motors?), did the guy that put it together mess up, or did something else cause this?

I have never seen such thing, not on Kia, Capri, GT, Protege or Miata heads. They all are like the one on the bottom.

what did you use to remove the seals?
is the head still on the block or did you remove it?

Head is still on the block. This was the next step after my thread asking about the keeper removal tool. I used a modified chip extractor as suggested in that other thread. They popped off pretty easy. No way I applied enough force to bend anything.

if you didn't bend em then someone before you did.

either way they're bent and messed up

For the benefit of those that do this in the future, the intake and exhaust seals are different! I'm working on a 1999, and the intake seals are KL01-10-155 (10-155 in the parts manual), the exhaust seals are KL02-10-155 (10-155B in the parts manual). The intake seals have a single ridge/ring on the top surface, the exhaust seals have a double ridge/ring. A deep 1/4" drive 10mm 6-point socket is the PERFECT tool to install the new seals. The socket holds it just tightly enough that you won't drop it, and puts the pressure needed to seat it on the outside edges.

This. They are thin and not hard to crush if you are using the wrong tool, or too much force.

All swapped out now with nice un-bent seals. After looking at all of them that I took off, I'm almost positive that someone pulled off and tried to re-use the old ones. The BEST part is that after a test drive, there is no more smoke, and no more oily sparkplugs!

As a bonus, I noticed there is barely any oil coming out of the crankcase vent anymore. I thought I had lots of blowby but it must have been coming from the ports through the bad seals!

Mine looked like that last time I replaced them, just due to fatigue and removing them.