Fast Oil Leak, Only When Engine Is Running

[cpmusick]

Hello. I have a 2000 Mercury Cougar V6.

Well I have a serious oil leak and I can't seem to figure out exactly where\why it's doing this. Well, today I decided to do an oil change because it was that time again. So I got the correct oil filter, changed that out, and I had to get a new oil drain plug as well (the old one was stripped).

Well all looked good until I started the car. I then looked under the hood and noticed that there was oil spraying in a stream from somewhere. Now, to make this easier to understand, I have taken a couple pictures and created a diagram of my oil leak.

Here's the entire "under the hood" area of my car:




And here's a closup of the area where the oil is spraying out from:



Now the oil only leaks\sprays out when the engine is running. When I turn off the car, it stops. Also, the direction of the spray is to the left and diagonally upward. A little bit of oil gets on my headlight.

I have tried loosening the oil filter a bit, then tightening it back to see if I could get a better seal, but that did nothing. However, the leak does not looking like it's coming from the oil filter at all. In fact, even if it was coming from the oil filter, it doesn't look as if it could be spraying up that high, since the engine would be in the way. I can't tell exactly where it's coming from, due to lack of space where my engine is, but it's in the general area as marked on the picture above.

If anyone has any ideas at all, then it would be greatly appreciated. I really like this car, but at the moment it's making its way to the top of my hit list.

[cpmusick]

Well, it seems that I was able to figure it out, and thaknfully it wasn't a big problem at all. What happened was when I removed the old oil filter, the rubber seal separated from it and remained attached to my engine (not sure how or why it did this). So I just removed the old seal and put the new oil filter back on and it's fixed.

However, quite a bit of oil got on some of the components such as on the engine and a couple hoses and wires and other stuff. Any recommendations on what type of cleaner or something that would remove the oil?