My brother has a 97 neon. He has an oil leak that is leaking from the back of his engine. The problems that we are having is all of the back side of the engine is covered so we cant see exaclt where the leak is, we really dont know that much about neons, and we dont have a lot of money to have a machanic take the engine out and just poke around at it. My question is, is there any prone spots on the engine to have a bad/blown gasket? Thanks for any help.

 

sounds like your headgasket is blown. if it is then its not going to be a cheap/easy fix. If you are mechanicly enclined you could replace the headgasket yourself but if its too bad the head will have to be milled so that it has a good flat level surface and that means takeing the head to a machine shop.

It cost me 650 to have a mechanic do all the work... thats on the spendy side so you will be looking to spend anywhere from 400-600 to have a mechanic do the work.

 

could be the back of your valve cover,could be bent or the gasket could need replaced. that cost around $50 for everything. or what he said?/\

 

why does the head have to be milled? if the head is off or warped i could see getting it milled but i dont see any real reason to get it milled

 

if you run it long enough with a blown headgasket it could get pitted and not seal up right.

 

another oil leak that neons are very infamous for is the cam seal. A few hints on how to detect if this may be your problem are:
1: the oil would be leaking from basicly the bottom of the timing belt cover.
2: if this seems to be so you can double check by taking off your passange side engine mount bracket then the timing belt cover and you should see if your car has "puked" out its cam seal, and it wil be very oily in there if so

if this is the cam seal its not that bad we just had ours done. The timing would be the hardest part of this job, make sure to get the cam seal retainer plate.

 

Get a can of Gunk engine cleaner, clean the engine, drive the car for a day or 2, get under the car and follow the oil trail, lol

 

How many miles do you have? Another good place to look is the front and rear main seal. The o rings that separate the spark plugs from the intake are notorious for leaking too.

 

Sorry havent been online in a while.
--First off I thought if a head gasket goes you get, in addition to an oil leak, white smoke out the back end from the burning coolent.
--The oil leak is not from the side(front) of the engine. It isnt the timing belt cover. I know that.
--We are going to clean it and track it like you said casper, but I just wanted to know of any prone spots to look for mabye to make it easier.
--And finally we dont know the cars mileage. Some of the gauges havent worked in a long time. I know there is over 100,000 miles on it.

So far the possibilities are 1.head gasket 2.valve cover 3.front/rear seals 4.o-rings inbetween intake and sparkplugs.
Thanks for the help this will give us a good place to start.

 

well my headgasket was blown and it didnt smoke out the tailpipe. It slowly started leaking untill one day sitting in traffic it started leaking enough to get onto the exhaust manifold and smoke.