I really can't help but laugh anymore. I've been chasing an oil leak in my Cj7 for awhile now. It looked like it was my valve cover gasket leaking. That kinda made sense because when I was putting this engine in last Summer/fall I had the valve cover off and never replaced the gasket. So I picked up a valve cover gasket, put it on and went wheeling the past two weekends. I've always made sure to keep an eye on my oil level and usually add to it as needed. No big deal, it's a jeep it marks it's territory.
This past sunday I went out to my girlfriends house to wash off my jeep and decided to really clean it, motor and all. I wanted to get all the residual oil off the motor, trans, transfer case and my belly pan. We used some degreaser and Purple Power and just went to town with the pressure washer. I had my jeep crazy clean. I let it sit there for a couple hours to dry out and it never left a drop of oil. I was convinced that my oil leak was solved with the valve cover gaskets and any drips between then and replacing the valve cover gasket were just residual oil dripping down.
I drove it home sunday night and parked it in the gravel. Monday morning I decided to drive my jeep to work since it was a nice day. At lunch on monday I noticed a puddle of oil under my jeep, crawled under it and everything was pretty much covered in oil. I was pretty pissed off and thought maybe my rear main seal went. Talked to girlfriend about bringing it out to her house to have her dad give me a hand replacing the rear main since I've never done one. I stopped out and we were looking over and my jeep and there was oil coming from my oil fill cap on my valve cover, down the back of the motor and onto the bellhousing and dripping down from there. I was losing a good bit of oil. We started my jeep to see if we could see the oil actually leaking but really couldn't. He removed my oil fill cap and pressure escaped. A good bit of pressure. I thought maybe my PCV's were clogged. They weren't. We checked the vacuum going to them and that was strong. I was running out of time so I left it there for the night. Last night went back over to do a compression test wondering if I had a bad head gasket, valve, cracked piston or head. The compression test results were:
1) 190
3)190 with a very slight bleed off (bad valve stem seal?)
5) 90
7) 90
2) 200
4) 195
6) 200 then rapidly decreasing
195 with a rapid loss also.
When it was running the pressure was building pretty quick which lead us to believe that compression from the motor was escaping. The compression test confirms IMO that I have a pretty serious problem.
Comments? Suggestions? Solutions?