Is this Symptom Valve Guide Seals?

[Shane's93LX]

Scenario: normal operating temp, sitting at idle for 10+ seconds, and a blip of the gas produces a small puff of grey-ish smoke. Haven't seen the cold-start yet. Car has some kind of PCV breather kit with a catch-can on a KB setup with no cats.

Valve guide seals, or maybe just oil from the PCV stuff? Compression and leakdown yields good numbers.

 

[cj428mach]

When I was trouble shooting smoking on my car I took a cheap stock h pipe and cut the H out of it and welded it up. This isolated the 2 banks and told me the problem was the passenger side. Also checking the plugs after the car would sit and inspecting inside the end of the exhaust manifolds after the midpipe was removed all pointed to valve seals.

 

[mvr]

When my valve guides and seals were bad mine would smoke on startup for a few seconds like 3 out of 5 times I started the car. Did not matter on temperatures of motor or how long it had been not running. Hope that helps, never noticed any oil type smoke while driving.

 

[mvr]

Also had low compression on a few of the cylinders

 

[nxhappy]

if compression and leak down are good, don't worry about it...also, burning smoke would be BLUE, not grey

 

[MalcolmV8]

Valve guide seals will cause smoke if they're bad enough. When it's a very small leak they just turn spark plugs black and you see nothing out the exhaust. Once they get a little worse you'll see puffs like you describe and eventually it'll get so bad the car smokes all the time but it takes a while.

 

[KLLR SNK]

If it is grey-ish smoke it sounds more like a fueling issue. I would isolate the bank then the cylinder(s) to inspect the spark plug. Without more information, I am thinking injector or tuning. If the smoke has a blue-ish tint then I would look at valve guide seals.