HELP! Car died and spark plugs COVERED in oil!

[RustBucket93]

HELP! My 93 Accord died the other day. It was sputtering at low RPM's, then parked it, fired it up the next day, and it just kept turning over, but never fired up.

So today I pull the spark plugs. THEY ARE COVERED IN OIL! Both where the plug wire hooks up to the plug, and the electrode are baithing in motor oil. I think I shed a tear when I saw it.

I did some searching, and someone mentioned it could be the valve cover gaskets . Please dear lord tell me this is the problem! Plese don't say rings or cylinders!

[phatdoughnut]

yeah its the seals around the spark plugs, i hope you cleaned all that oil up before you took the plugs out...

it could fuck things up.

[RustBucket93]

After a call to the service department at Honda, I am pretty confident that it's the spark plug seats. I bought 4 new seats, a new valve cover gasket, and 4 new NGK plugs. $30 later, I should be set. I think I'm going to hold off untill tomorrow because I'm running out of daylight.


No, I diddnt clean anything up. What exactly do you mean my "it could fuck things up"?

[Maple50175]

Yeah Valve Cover gasket/spark plugs etc

[FishyMan]

if possible can u take pics to help fellow peeps out? but just saying.

good luck and wish u the best..

did u buy a set of those? they said there's a set at checker's made by felpro.. i have to change mines as well. i notice around the valve cover oil is leak ish ..

[RustBucket93]

Yea...I'll take pics along the way.

[RustBucket93]

So, since I diddnt clean out the spark plug tubes, and the oil that was in the tubes probably fell in, will I mess something up or will the oil just burn off?

Do you think I could just change the upper plug seals and be done, or do I need to take off the rocker arms and change the lower one too?

[RustBucket93]

Here's another idea I had.


Clean everything up and replace the upper seals. Clean up the old plugs, put them in, fire it up and let it burn off the oil, and then install the new NGK plugs.

Sound good?

[RustBucket93]

Well, I replaced the upper plug seals and it doesnt leak oil anymore. I fired it up and it still ran rough. Then I ran a bottle of SeaFoam through the PCV hose in the throttle body, changed the dist. cap and rotor, put everything back together, and it drove drove perfectly! For about 10 minutes that is. Then it started to act up again. But it was still running, and I drove it to work the next morning. Then after work, I went home, and it stalled out on the way home. I got it running but it would stutter below 2500 RPMs. And then right before I got home, it was running perfectly fine. So the problem is intermittent. What should I do? I will try to run another can of SeaFoam in it. BUt I'm looking for other suggestions. Could it be a loose vaccum hose somewhere? Funny thing is, it runs perfectly fine if the RPM's are above 2500. ANd it runs fine if I feather the gas below 2500 rpms, but as soon as I step on it it will stutter and die. Please help!