Oil aound spark plug

[Keg914]

I have a 2001 saturn sl 2 and I noticed some oil around all the spark plugs. The engine seems to be loosing oil a little bit as well, about a quart a week. Its not buring it or leaking that I noticed. Any ideas?

[Cat Fuzz]

The valve cover has orings that seal the spark plug wells. These are leaking. Removing and resealing the valve cover will fix it.

[denisond3]

Its true the oil around the spark plugs is leaking due to the seals at the base of the 'well', but the Saturn S series engines are also well known for consuming oil steadily. Its due to the oil control rings on the pistons, and will get slowly worse over the years. But if you keep oil in the engine it may run half a million miles or more (some owners have passed 500,000 with no engine work at all). The fix is to remove the engine, put in new piston rings, rehone the cylinders, and re-assemble. Then it will run for 5000 or more miles without using even a quart - until the rings on the pistons get worn again after maybe another 100,000 miles.

By the way; the oil around the spark plugs doesnt hurt anything. You can just let it leak there if you dont want to bother fixing it. It wont build-up too much, since it can just leak back into the camshaft cover space. Just clean the oil off the plugs before you put them back in.

Even if the engine were going through a quart every 250 miles, you probably wont see any blue smoke at all. The cat. converter burns up all of the oil residue.