Help Please! need your help

[howangs14]

hey guys im about to buy this 240 for a pretty good price but the bad about the car (from what the owner tells me) is that it smokes. he describe it as a greyish/ blackish smoke. at first i thought i was the headgasket but the smoke would be whitish? right? well the oil smells alittle like gas if that helps. please help me out guys. oh yea, its a 90 ka24e. thanks in advance. its has over 200k on it if that helps too.

[benemorius]

It does sound like oil burning. Go pick up a compression tester, search the forums for the proper way to do a compression test, then go do it. Report your results and we'll talk.

[howangs14]

cool man, thanks, ill get right on it. if its burning oil what might the problem be? will it cost a lot to get it fixed. thanks again

[Arrow]

if it's black smoke it very well could be that the car is running rich... That could have a number of different solutions as well. From what I remember, when a car burns oil (just oil) it is a bluish colored smoke. Now it could be that the engine is burning both oil and is running rich... It's really hard to say without a little more info. Hope that this helps and good luck! (don't get discouraged either, 240's are great cars... Just get that compression test done and post the results up!)

[senioritis]

pick that car up already!!

[benemorius]

Oil smells like gas? I didn't catch that part before. It has to be pretty friggin rich to make smoke, but like Arrow said, that could be the case. When there is enough (read: way too much) fuel in the cylinders, it begins to wash the oil off the walls and get scraped down into the crankcase by the piston rings. Now, I've never seen this cause the oil to smell of fuel, but then I don't always smell the oil. Speaking of smelling, catch a whiff of the smoking exhaust and see what you think of it. Even to the uneducated nose, burning oil smells quite different from running pig rich.