About 180k miles on the odo, 3.7L V6. Switched it to full synthetic oil when I bought it, which seemed to make the problem a lot worse, but stubbornly don’t want to switch back to a synthetic blend which it ran on its whole life until now.

Burning a quart roughly every 500 miles, sometimes worse. I replaced the PCV valve with a genuine Mopar valve, which didn’t help. It doesn’t seem to be leaking or getting into the coolant.

thanks in advance for your suggestions

 

So you have oil in the coolant? Oil cooler is my first thought, but I'm not sure the 3.7 used an oil-coolant heat exchanger

 

Nope, coolant is clean

 

Ok, I misunderstood that part

Chrysler motors love to leak valve stem seals, plugged air cleaner causing high manifold vacuum could increase this. Does it smoke?

 

Maybe a tiny bit of smoke on start up but no smoke at least that I can notice while driving or after warmed up.

If air cleaner = air filter, it’s clean, brand new.

 

valve stem seals usually only smoke on start up, oil drip and pools on the valve while sitting when you fire it up it burns alot and smokes, after that its minimal passage and probably wont smoke

 

After doing some research I believe you are correct about this being the problem, I do a ton of short trips so this makes total sense as to why it's burning so much oil, lots of starts. Thanks a lot!

The valve stem seal replacement looks like a pain. Do you think I need to bite the bullet and do it soon? I'm not sure if a couple thousand more miles of burning oil will be really bad for the engine or do minimal damage.

 

I mean other then maybe gumming up things a little bit, as long as you keep the oil level correct there's little harm in driving it

 

Thanks dude, I appreciate the info so much. Gonna replace the seals as soon as I have a little more time.

 

There is the possibility that the oil is slipping past the piston rings. You can perform a leakdown test to find out. Even though you take good care of truck, it does not erase the transgressions of previous owners, if they had bad oil habits.

I replaced stems seals and lifters back when Covid was raging. I was getting a the occasional puff of smoke on startup and when pulling off from a stop. I wasn't losing much oil to begin with, but I needed to replace the lifters after a frozen lifter caused a rocker to eject. Since I was in there, I replaced the stem seals. Truck had over 300K mi, so I'd say it was overdue.

https://dodgeforum.com/forum/2nd-gen...tem-seals.html

https://dodgeforum.com/forum/2nd-gen...ine-issue.html