Well up here in Mass its snowing and cold and I have no garage so I had to take my truck to a Valvoline instant oil change (I hate doing that) and when they pulled the oil cap off there the oil was a spicy mustard color and about the same consistancey. and i believe the guy said something about the top end but on the dip stick the oil was fine i didnt get a chance to see what the oil looked like comming out was and they were going to do a engine flush but they already started draining the oil and what not so i didnt get the flush done. im just woundering if neone has an idea of what might have caused this and why? it looked like water was present i have no idea but im thinking that i need to do an engine flush just to be sure.


Any info would be great thanks
Matt

 

normal for these trucks.

do you drive alot of short trips? or was that trip to valvoline a short trip? if you drive these trucks a short distance without a good warmup the oil cap does that. Its just the way it was designed, the oil filler neck is pretty long and there are rockers and cam lobes right below it. Oil splashes up there and never really heats up until you drive alot.

 

ya the trip to the place was about a 6 min drive the engine temp just got to normal right before i got there so maybe thats it other than that i do alot of longhigh way drives to work ill keep my eye on it thanks

 

after you take a nice long hiway drive check the cap. I bet you won't see it there. Short trips in cold weather are killer on engines not getting up to temp long enough to evaporate the water that is there from short trips. A byproduct of combustion is water.. and you WILL get some past the rings. Especially at lower than operating temps. Check out your radiator too. If you see black gunk near the filler or in the expansion tank... well then you DO have some problems. Like a head gasket leak.

 

Have you ever considered a PCV separator? I noticed the same thing on my '99 5.4L and was worried that I had a leaky gasket somewhere. However, after making and installing a cheap PCV separator and wiping it clean, the nasty oil stuff hasn't come back over the last 1000 miles.

Here's a pic of the simple PCV jar that I built using a plastic pop bottle, some steel wool (for washing dishes), and a glass jar. You can see the condensation on the inside of the jar that is water being filtered out of the PCV. The pic doesn't show very well, but there is some oily stuff at the bottom of the jar as well. This was after only one trip from work to home (about 10 miles).





This is the stuff that's in the bottle. NOTE: The bottom half of the bottle is cut away so the air can flow through the lid, over the steel wool (pic above) and then circulate up and away, through the top of the jar (through the vacuum line back into the intake manifold).

Edit:

I got the idea from HERE though I don't really believe their claim of 25% increase in mileage. It will help more if your engine is well worn and has quite a bit of blow-by, though. They used copper plated bb's instead of steel wool though they recommend glass/silica beads. The copper and/or silica beads may have a slight catalytic effect which could increase efficiency.

It hasn't helped my mileage much, but getting the water out of the crankcase is more than worth the time and cost to make it, along with the slight increase in maintenance.

 

its normal...

 

The oil cap on my truck (99 5.4l) gets a little gunk like you are talking about.
I was told that it is from the engine heating up and oil splash, and when the oil cools in cold weather the steam/condensate from it cooling settles there. there is nothing wrong with the truck mine i noticed at about 20,000 mi and happened every winter till I sold it with 119,000mi. now I have the same year and engine of ford truck 24,000mi. and it does the same thing.
no worries

 

Like someone said above, if you take a lot of trips where the motor doesn't warm up completely things of that nature will happen a lot, regardless of vehicle make and model.

Take a few more minutes to let the motor warm up when you start it up, and give it a minute or two when you're about to shut down on your drives and see if it corrects. I noticed that helped a similar problem I had a couple summers ago...