Oil leaking around throttle body, any advice on cause (with pics)

M4tt

Hello,

My wife's 2002 2.2 Astra convertible (88k miles) has had a "slight" oil leak for a little over a year (first mentioned to us by Vauxhall on the last service a year ago). I have had to put about 5L of oil in over the last year however I have had no drips in my garage where the car is kept and no real issues that I am aware of (once after a few days of inactivity it seemed that one plug wasn't firing for 20 seconds after starting her up but this has only happened once and she has been left many times for longer and had no similar problems) and I am not noticing any abnormal smoke from the rear. The oil leak was also mentioned to me by my MOT garage in January but not as in anything serious.

As you can see from the pictures I have attached there is a fair bit of oil which seems to be coming from the throttle body/air intake junction. One thing to mention is that the jubilee clip holding these together needs replacing as it doesn't do up tight. Although this may be allowing the oil to leak out a bit if it didn't leak out it would just burn off anyway (if my understanding is correct) so I would still need to top-up at times.

Has anyone any ideas of what the cause would be and anything, relatively simple, that I can try.

Many thanks,
Matt

guy_27

that will be coming from the breather pipe from the rocker cover which feeds in to the intake pipe.

M4tt

guy 27 said:
that will be coming from the breather pipe from the rocker cover which feeds in to the intake pipe.

Any ideas why and what i need to do to fix it?

guy_27

have a browse through the forum. i think if you keyword search catch can you will find a fair few posts.
many have fitted a catch can to stop the oil getting to the throttle body. all the 2.2's i own all have minor blow by. I clean out the intake pipe every once in a while. I guess if its never been cleaned it will pool up and leak out.

usually though when there is excess oil vapor piston rings are the culprit.

M4tt

Thanks for the reply. Piston rings doesn't sound good at all. Apart from getting a compression test is there anything else I can look for to see if this is the case? Or any other options I could check out?

guy_27

Can try a thicker oil. What is currently being used in it?

milo

If your psiton rings have gone, it means your burning off the oil. The rings went on my vectra and the way u could tell is at high revs blue smoke was coming out the exhaust and every 300mile i was getting check oil lvl.

evocarlos

looks like its never ever been cleaned get yourself a can of carb cleaner take off the pipe from airbox to T/B and wash it thru with carb cleaner then take off the T/B 4 m6 bolts clean the t/b with paper towel and carb cleaner then spray some carb cleaner in the bottom on the intake manifold put it all back together
rinse repeat every 10k miles 🙂

M4tt

Sounds like a cleanup may be all that i need to do as i have only needed to add about 300ml per 1000 miles. Thanks all.