My 79 is smoking really really really bad at start up for about 90 seconds, I have gave the car a tune up, but this is like standing in fog, is really thick white smoke? Anyone how what this is from and how to fix it, the car has 81k on it
Thanks Pete

 

bad water seal maybe..

 

Either that or his oil control o-rings are completely worn out.

Is it using a lot of oil or water?

 

Not using water, drove it down from Buffalo a month ago and used 1.5 quarts of oil is 850 miles drive
If either of above are these backyard fixes? easy to do?

 

if you are using that much oil then something is worng.. could be your seals or o-rings.

revhed: i thought that if it were an oil problem, then the smoke would be darker, not white. correct? no?

 

Yeah, that's quite a bit of oil to lose over 850 miles.

Another tell-tale sign is if it smokes when letting off the throttle at high revs as the sudden vacuum pulls the oil past the seals and into the combustion chamber.

Unfortunately, replacement of the o-rings requires a complete tear-down of the engine.

riffraff- Oil smoke is usually kind of whiteish while petrol smoke is pretty dark. I should know... the o-rings on my old engine were worn out and it used to smoke really bad. Almost went through more oil than fuel.

 

If a rebuild is out of the question just feed it oil. I have had motors that consumed a quart every 150 miles. It still ran fine. All I had to do was pull the plugs out for a regular wire brush scrapping to remove carbon every so often.
The cost of 1quart of oil is like adding an extra gallon of gas at every fill up.

 

my camry was like that, excpet it was a quart with almost every other fillup.