Man, what a CRAPPY day today was.
To start things off, I was planning on heading to the post office, and since I hadn't driven the C5Z for a while, was looking forward to the drive. Aw hell, DIC says "Low voltage" and it wouldn't crank over. Damn... That is a fairly new Exide Orbital battery in there, so no way it should be dying this soon. So I went and got the sears battery charger (these are probably worth their weight in gold if you don't already have one) and charged up the battery to about 90 percent, and then set it to START and cranked up the vette. I tried several cycles of turning it off and starting the car with no problems, so I figured it would be safe to drive it into town and not get stranded.
I had to stop in at the grocery store first, to pick up a couple of items. This is about 20 miles or so from my home. When I came out of the store, I noticed a puddle underneath my car, and at first thought it was just condensation or something from the A/C. But wait a minute! That puddle is under the tailpipes!
What the hell? Well that puddle was OIL. And a fair amount of it. The entire back of my car was COVERED with oil as well.
Uh oh.... NOT good. I abandoned plans to go to the post office and just headed on home. Well I got most of the way there, and noticed the oil pressure gauge needle was dropping. So I put it on the DIC and watched it slide on down through 15 psi and hit around 12. That's when the lifters started tapping. Luckily there was a convenience store nearby, so I drifted in there and shut the engine down pronto. Bought 3 quarts of oil (they didn't have synthetic, but I had no choice) and put them into the crank case. Then bought two more to take with me. Oil pressure went right back up and I made it back home without losing my engine.
When I got home, I checked out everything thoroughly. As best I could tell, the oil was solely coming out of the tail pipes and not being blown back from the front of the car. No smoke telling me it was coming from the engine itself, and no splatters of oil underneath the vehicle. Looks like it was blowing out the tail pipes and then splattered on the back of the vehicle from air flow. NOT a pretty picture at all! Hell of a mess, actually.
So my guess was that the problem was in the turbos. Somehow oil was getting into the exhaust part of them and being blown out the tailpipes. So I called up Greg at AntiVenom for help. He told me some things to check, but honestly I had never bothered to LOOK to see where the parts were, so I wasn't even sure what I was looking at. But I eventually got things oriented and best I could tell the return oil pump (this brings oil back from the turbos and then dumps it back into the crankcase via a fitting in the driver's side valve cover. Greg put a quick connect there, so it was REAL easy to pull off and check.
When I tried later to get Greg on the phone, I was unable to reach him so I called STS and spoke to a guy named Chris. He gave me a bunch of things to check and waited on the phone while I checked them out. Never knew there was a toggle switch on that oil pump to put it in low and high mode. But it certainly showed me that the pump was working via audible cues. Anyway, Chris suggested that I put the pump into high mode and take it out for a spin to see if that helps. Which I did, and it did appear to stop the oil from blowing out of the tailpipes. Not sure what it means, though, as obviously something is amiss that needs to get fixed. But perhaps at least now I can drive it to wherever I need to go to get it fixed. Otherwise it appeared I was going to have to flatbed it, as there are no STS authorized repair stations anywhere less than 3 hours away. Which would mean I would have to throw about 300 gallons of oil in the trunk. Would be a LOT cheaper to flatbed it.....
So I need to call Chris tomorrow to see what he suggests. Most importantly whether I can trust it to drive several hours to get it fixed.
And, of course, I'm wondering whether it will even start up tomorrow. That battery problem is still lurking........
