Oil leak question.

[cheeseandbeans]

Afternoon all.

So after my eventful weekend with the bottom ball joint snapping on my Z3 I've now had chance to put it on the ramp. Seems I have an oil leak coming from somewhere. It was all over the bottom of the sump and across the steering components. Question is are there any obvious places I should be looking before investigating this?

It's a 1998 1.9 if needed.

Cheers

 

[t-tony]

Quite common for oil to leak from the oil filter housing/engine block joint gasket. Get a couple of aerosol cans of brake cleaner and thoroughly clean all the oil off. The run it and monitor where it appears from. A little oil goes a very long way and this has probably been going on for quite a while. Good luck in tracing and curing the leak!

Tony.

 

[5harp3y]

As Tony said or it could be the rocker cover gasket (easy job)

 

[Parmst]

just had the same problem fixed on mine today - oil all over sump and steering etc looked much worse than it actually was. Turned out to be a crank shaft gasket.

 

[cheeseandbeans]

Got the zed back after a couple of weeks in the garage. All steering components have been replaced on both sides and a new exhaust back box fitted and it drives and sounds great. As for the oil leak, it appears to be coming from a gasket on the timing case, would that sound logical? It's number 4 and number 10 on these diagrams.

http://www.realoem.com/bmw/enUS/showparts?id=CH72-EUR-02-1997-Z3-BMW-Z3_19&diagId=11_0156
http://www.realoem.com/bmw/enUS/showparts?id=CH72-EUR-02-1997-Z3-BMW-Z3_19&diagId=11_2685

I've attached a couple of photos too. Best I could get at the moment but it looks like someone may have tried a quick repair with the amount of black gunk near the offending location.

Question now is, how big a job to change that out?

Thanks