sean.zimmerman

Hi everyone, I am in a very unfortunate situation. I recently bought a fully built motor with a turbo kit and many other accessories for my NA. It came with a NB VVT head and now that I am beginning the tuning process it has has developed an insane leak. This leak is coming from the intake cam side from behind the VVT phaser. So far to fix this I have done the following: when I put the engine in it had a brand new valve cover gasket. Since then I have resealed it twice with RTV to try my best to rule that out. I replaced the cam seal most recently which also did not fix it. The leak comes down the back and front of the timing cover behind the cam gears. Another note is that whenever I think I did something to fix it, the leak doesn’t come back right away. It will not leak until I rev the car up a bit and then it comes back. Once the leak comes back it will start dripping oil like crazy even at idle (a drop every few seconds or so).

Where should I go next? I know the VVT cam phaser is a nightmare to rebuild with a low success rate. Is it possible that is what might be causing the leak? I feel like this is somehow VVT related because this only happens on the intake side everytime. Is there something else that could be causing this that I am missing? I was also thinking of getting a smoke testing machine to try and pinpoint the leak. Any advice would be really appreciated because I don’t know where to go from here.

curly

iTrader: (25)

The cam phaser is actually quite easy to rebuild, there are two large o-rings that may be leaking, I’m assuming you can see it coming down the valve cover from any of the external VVT hardware? Other than that, there’s some galley plugs behind the metal timing cover you could check.

sean.zimmerman

The person I got the engine from cut back the valve cover for an exposed timing belt set up which is why I see the oil leaking there. I can try to get a picture shortly to show where it’s coming from but it is definitely below the VVT part that sits on top of the valve cover. I also did just replace all those seals recently too.

I did look at one of the galleys when I did the cam seal but I couldn’t tell if it was leaking or just wet from the leaking oil like everything else was. I guess I’ll pull the VVT cam gear off again and maybe the timing cover as well to see if that leads to anything.

sean.zimmerman

Ok here’s some photos to go along with what I’m saying:

Photo labeled 1:
The blue circle is where the oil is dripping off (almost a steady stream) and it lands on the timing belt pulley which has lead to oil going all over the place. The red lines indicated somewhat where the stream or 2 have been coming down the cover. The streams on the front are new after the cam seal replacement though. Before I did cam seal the leak only went behind this cover and the front was relatively dry.

Photo labeled 2:
This is just to give a different angle. You can see how much oil is on the front with this one.

Photo labeled 3:
This is the back of that cover and the green line showed generally where the original stream of oil was. It would go down the back and also drip onto the timing belt pulley in the same place.

As I said, this leak has actually gotten much worse sense doing the cam seal somehow. Just to cover everything to make sure I’m not missing something this is how I went about doing it. The old one was in there really tight so I took the camshaft cap off to get the old seal out. With the cam off I put the new seal in loosely and as I put the cap back on made sure the seal was evenly pressed all the way back. I then tightened the cam cap to 110 in/lbs. I cleaned all of the RTV from the valve cover and reapplied a decent amount to make sure those corners were sealed quite well. After that I just put everything together and that was that. Was putting the cam seal in this way a bad idea maybe? I just don’t understand how doing a cam seal would make this even worse.

rjacobs

rebuild the VVT actuator with the kit from Miataroadsters... Im in agreement with Curly that one of the large o-rings is probably leaking if you have changed all the other seals.

Its super easy to do, just go slow and take some pics of the direction of a few things.

sean.zimmerman

This might be a stretch but does anyone happen to know where I could buy only those 2 large o-rings? I just bought a full VVT gasket kit that covered everything except those o-rings unfortunately.

rjacobs

Reach out to Bill at Miataroadster. He might sell you just the big o-rings.

sean.zimmerman

I will do that, also one last question: I noticed there is one other seal on the camshaft that looks nearly impossible to take off. I talked to one of the guys at Flyin' Miata and they said not to worry about it. I just want at least one more confirmation before I pull this apart and put it back together a third time.

Is the black seal at the front of the cam something that would cause this leak? (Picture attached)