VW Golf mk5 GTi burning oil

How often does it tell you in the owner's handbook to check it?

You really shouldn't run it that low on oil, then rely on the warning light to remind you it needs topping up.

Oh, and 1000 miles per litre is not unusual on these engines.

Chris

"Slider" wrote in message news:g7pjt8$v09$ snipped-for-privacy@aioe.org...

Assuming by 4-6 months you mean about 5000 miles then it's excessive by the standards of an ideally designed engine but all manufacturers will quote you their 1 litre per 1000 miles bullshit to avoid any warranty claims. I guess they have to set a minimum limit at some level or other but any higher consumption than that would be ridiculous. The trouble is manufacturers are using piston rings with less and less spring tension these days to reduce frictional losses inside the engine and improve fuel consumption. Many engines are right on the borderline between adequate ring sealing and inadequate sealing leading to high oil consumption and reduced power. If an engine runs in perfectly it should just be ok with low tension rings but it doesn't make much of a problem during the running in phase for things to go badly wrong. Too gentle usage for too long or using synthetic oil before the pistons and bores have bedded in properly and it'll never run in fully.

There's nothing much you can do to cure it other than rebuild the engine and run it in again which is clearly impractical. So the remaining option is to try a thicker oil but that will cost you more in extra petrol than the cost of the oil you save. That leaves you with living with it and to honest a litre per 2500 miles is not that much of a problem. It's maybe 2 to 4 times as much as an ideal engine would use but it hardly means you have stop to check it every trip to the shops.

It may improve with more mileage and/or harder use for a while. An Italian tune up can sometimes help. That means draining out the synthetic oil if that's what it has in it, putting in some cheap and cheerful 10-40 and caning the arse off it for a few hundred miles to try and run the piston/bores in again. Full throttle and revs to the redline every chance you get and then put the proper oil back in and see what happens.

Any decent modern engine that's been run in properly should use negligible oil. My 2 litre Focus, even on 5-30 synthetic that's as thin as rat piss, uses hardly enough to notice. The last change was 3000 miles ago and when I checked it last week it was still right at the top of the stick. The half litre I have left over in the 5 litre can I used for the last oil change will easily last me until the next one.

BTW if you think your oil consumption is bad it reminds me about one of my first cars nearly 30 years ago. A 1275 A series engined Morris Marina with an engine that was so shagged it chucked out so much smoke you could rarely see the cars behind you. I arranged to take it up to my uncle's garage in Derbyshire 150 miles away to rebuild the engine over the holidays. I topped it up with oil before I set off up the M1 and took another full gallon can of 20-50 with me. 50 miles later the oil light came on and I stopped and put half of the gallon can in the sump. Another 50 miles later it needed the rest and I still had 50 miles to go. Climbing up through the hills of the Peak District with a few miles to go the oil light came on again and the engine partially seized under the load. I had to change down to third, then second to maintain progress and in the end I was limping along at 20 mph and praying to all the gods I could call to mind that it would make the journey. There was certainly nowhere to stop to buy more oil and whether it would have even started again is an unknown. My uncle's driveway was on quite a steep slope and as I turned into that it got half way up in 1st gear and croaked to its final halt with a horrible rattle and a small cloud of steam and smoke. We had to tow it the rest of the way into the garage. The phrase "making it by the skin of your teeth" doesn't quite do that journey justice.

A quick calculation indicates that its oil consumption was 1 gallon or 4.546 litres per 100 miles. A litre every 22 miles. It was costing me more in oil than petrol. When your engine gets to that stage start to worry.

Ah thems were the days.

None of my cars have used significant amounts of oil. The Mk1 Golf

*leaked* quite a bit over the alternator, like they do, and the 2 TDI cars I've have from new and newish have used a bit until run in (approx 20k miles, it would seem). That includes the Mk2 Golf at 140K miles on thinnish modern oil.

It does seem a good few VAG engines use a fair bit when new though.

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Dave Baker" saying something like:

A 1275 Marina was similarly the worst oil consumer I've come across - about 40miles per pint iirc and that was on a new company car with a warranty still in force. Smokescreen, of course, but not as bad as yours by the sound of it. The engine got changed, but that car was a pile of shit.

My Grans was like that when I was given it, 13000miles old. I put the old inlet valve stem seals on the exhausts & that pretty much solved that problem.