Manny does have a point man. Since the engine has been sitting or so long, a compression test wont hurt. Plus it will give you a good sense of whats going on with the internals.

It can sometimes take a good long time to burn off all the crap in the exhaust if the car has sat for a while. Could be a bird's nest in the main cat that's burning off, you never know :).

That said, with a lot of smoke it would be dead obvious if it was a bad coolant seal. Coolant would be shooting out the water neck with the engine cold, the car would be a pain to get to start up.

With an oil seal, the engine will start quite easily and make great compression due to the extra oil. Some oil burners will smoke only at certain times, like heavy load and only lightly at idle/cruise.

Also, make sure your PCV system is happy. Quick test is running the car with the oil fill cap off. If the crankcase is pressurized you'll get all kinds of oil smoke. The nipples to the oil fill neck have to be hooked up properly.

Finally, you could have a bad or leaky oil seal on a turbo. That's usually more likely than bad oil seals, which is possible but pretty uncommon.

Good luck with it!

Dale

Good Thinking Dale!... what turbo/turbos were you running again? (sorry for being lazy, can't remember if you posted or not). But if the turbo/turbo's were sitting just as long as the motor...you never know. The leading plug still kinda makes me think though.. I really don't think it should look like that after 25-30 min of running on a virgin motor...

I'm running stock turbos which I bought from Fritz a couple years ago and which supposedly had 40k on them.

OK, I just started it w/out the oil filler cap and it made no difference.

Right now my last hope, I think, is that the primary rear injector is just dumping fuel (see my earlier injector troubles in the previous thread...I have not had them sent off the be re-flowed). and perhaps the rear rotor is not even getting spark. It *seems* like the motor is too smooth to be running on only one rotor, but see my spark plug picture above... The rear one is totally clean. Also when I took it out it was wet with fuel and smelled like fuel.

My hope comes only from the few threads I've seen where people claim that cars which were basically dumping fuel into the chamber made white smoke. I don't know if that's a true phenomenon, but if not I'm probably going to be pulling the motor and re-doing it.

thanks,
James