Oil Leak

Title Screen from Timing Belt Change Removal and Installation on Mitsubishi Endeavor video

Started watching the linked video to see what we were getting into, stayed for the music, which is pretty good. I think it is all instrumental, no singing. The video can't be played from here, you have to go to YouTube to watch it.

Our 2006 Mitsubishi Endeavor has developed a small oil leak. Right now it's just an annoyance but I thought I should look into fixing it. Took it to a local auto repair shop, they wanted to to run a dye test for something like $200. I said no to that. I don't care where the oil is coming from, $200 could get you half way to getting it fixed.

Osmany and I crawled underneath the other day and from what we could see it looked like the rear valve cover might be leaking. Today we did some exploratory surgery. We pulled off the right front wheel, the splash shield from the wheel well, and the upper part of the timing belt cover. That was enough that could get a better look and now it looks like it is the rear camshaft seal that is leaking. Bah, bah and humbug.

Replacing that seal means pulling the timing belt and removing the cog wheel from the camshaft. It's almost as bad as having to replace the timing belt, which is what led us to the above video. I had the timing belt replaced about a year ago, er five years ago, and it cost around $1000. I wouldn't be surprised if just replacing this one cam seal would cost half of that.

Replacing the timing belt is a fairly straight forward operation, hampered of course by the tight quarters imposed by the transverse engine mounting, but this engine has a peculiar belt tensioning system that looks to be a real pain in the neck to set correctly (at the 15 mark in the above video).