Oil on my spark plugs

[nike001]

Okay, I was going to post this in either the headlines thread or the what'd you do for your zhp today thread but I figured this deserves its own thread.

So, Terra and one of my mechanic buddies helped me do my VANOS today. Pulled my plugs and they were all black from burnt oil and the plugs from #3 and #4 were soaked in oil (esp #4)

The kicker is: CCV just replaced, No oil in coolant & no coolant in oil. Every plug was coated in burnt oil.

I need ideas from my ZHP brothers!! I can't continue to put oil every 1,000 miles in my car!

[Hornung418]

Change your VCG and related grommets. Make sure you torque every bolt down to 11 lb-ft and in a criss-cross fashion starting from the front corner to the opposite back corner and work your way to the middle.

[nike001]

VCG was replaced last november or so by the dealer... we re-used it after VANOS since nothing was wrong with it and did criss-cross putting it back on.

even still: I don't see how the VCG would have anything to do with my car physically burning oil

[nike001]

The only good news of today: My shiz is squeaky clean!

[zj96sc]

How many miles? Engine mx history/oil change frequency/type of oil used? Compression numbers? General performance?

Maybe bad valve seals, maybe bad rings. Either way, a bunch of oil in your cylinders is never caused by something easy.

[Hornung418]

Those center gaskets could be letting oil down into the Combustion Chamber. IDK, it's a small price to pay to know that it's done properly by you. Then you could definitely eliminate that as an issue.

Also you may want to pull the skid plate and make sure your Oil Pan is properly torqued to spec. You may be losing oil from a leaking seal.

[nike001]

112k miles. Easily one of the cleanest zhp's on the road. The BMW techs love my car for how all the internals are literally almost brand new.

Oil: changed 2x since I've had it (13k mi).. one time with M1 0w40 and second time with Castrol 0w30(from terra's request)
You can see from my above pic.. that oil was changed in good intervals. My engine is one of the cleanest that I've seen...and I'm greatly appreciative of PO

Performance: I can pull on other zhp's I have messed around with and car doesn't miss a beat.

Should a compression test be my next course of action? We already have valve seals and rings on the possible suspects. I'm not really to accept one of those as the symtoms. That would be WAY too much money for me to do.

[Hornung418]

Well that's the next step if you can't solve it with the basic troubleshooting.

[nike001]

Well that's the next step if you can't solve it with the basic troubleshooting.

Haha I know. My buddy offered to help me do it and pull the engine to re-do everything in there. But that would be waaay too much $$.

Compression test next? Yay/nay?

[Hornung418]

Yay.