Lost the oil fill cap; rag bad plug!

[bobstad]

Driving last night, after adding about a third of a quart of oil; I forgot to screw back in the oil fill cap in the valve cover. Leaving the gas station parking lot, I heard the oil fill cap fall to the pavement; which then got run over some time after midnight, by the only car on the road besides me for the next ten or fifteen minutes.

I stuck a tightly wadded up rag into the oil fill hole, screwing that in snugly; but, on a whim after about five hundred miles, nearly thirty miles from home, I stopped to get something at a grocery early Sunday morning, and at a stop sign heard a slight clicking noise which is one heard intermittently on infrequent occasions.

So, I lifted the hood at the grocery and found oil all over the valve cover, the distributor and anywhere adjacent; checked the dip stick which turned out to be dry, added a quart and the dip stick was still dry, so added another, which brought the level close enough to full to drive home.

I'm irked the oil light never came on; and wonder both, how little oil I could drive the car with, and how down on oil the motor has to be to make the oil light come on?

I'm also surprised that the tightly wadded up rag didn't keep oil from leaking past that; which used to be a pretty good method. I was using a synthetic fabric like some sweat shirts are made from; which was lousy as a shop rag since not very absorbent. So, that probably didn't help; though I really had the rag tightly folded into a plug, which was pretty hard to screw into the hole that compressed the rag even more.

Right now I'm wondering where to get a replacement oil fill cap; and if any other makes will fit besides a Festiva's? I have a piece of the old cap, which is enough to match to another car's fill hole to see if that car's cap would fit my car's valve cover.

Since getting the car the summer of '99 I've wondered when or if I'd ever space out and forget to replace the oil fill cap; and now I wish I'd gotten a replacement beforehand. I think I'll try to figure out someway to attach a lanyard or another arrangement, so the oil fill cap will be impossible to lose like I've just done.

[nitrofarm]

I dont think you have much to worry bout.A little oil looks like a lot when its freshly splashed all over your motor.

[Movin]

You have to suck air at the bottom of the oil pan before the light will even blink. Long miles on the interstate probably didn't shake the oil around much at all. If the oil pump is worn and / or front seal worn out air will be sucked into the oil pump and the lifters will clatter when the oil starts to get low...even then the oil light won't come on.

[koRnhead]

Oil light is pressure related. Not volume. Normally it has to drop below 5psi to trigger the oil light.

[jbuck1975]

Need a new one?

EVO deck'd out with Bruce Lee

[TominMO]

Probably a rather common oil cap. Go the a JY and try Festivas, Aspires, other Mazdas, even early 90s Escorts and Capris, which have Mazda motors too.

[Movin]

Oil light is pressure related. Not volume. Normally it has to drop below 5psi to trigger the oil light.

And if that happens without running out of oil its too late to save the engine !
Most parts stores should be able to supply a new oil cap, good idea about the little chain to keep it close by. Like heavy equip. fuel caps. If oil level warning is that important to you a newer car level sensor could be fabbed into the oil pan.

[georgeb]

If the level got below the pickup tube (usually in a turn), the light would come on. Need to pull over IMMEDIATELY and investigate.

[koRnhead]

Exactly! Oil light comes on. It should be an immediate reaction to shut it off and check it out!!

[FoMoCoMotion]

This may do the trick:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/MAZDA-MIATA-...item3ca226f823

[boydg1]

.... NAPA got'em. about $6.00
.

[zoom zoom]

Just walk in any auto parts store and ask if they have a "710" cap. They should know what your talking about, and they probably have new ones for around 5 bucks.

[MasterTec]

My old 89 Tempo leaked oil like you wouldn't believe. This was the kind of car where "EVERYTHING" is wrong with it and you don't want to drop another dime into it but it runs too well to get rid of it!

Anyway I never bothered changing the oil. About once every couple of months my ex- wife would complain the oil light would stay on for an extra ten seconds or so on a cold start. Then I would add four quarts of oil until it was on the full line and she'd be good to go for another couple of months.

I'll note that the car only holds five quarts total!

Yes I really wanted that car to die. It never did. I eventually sold it for the same price I paid for it eight years prior ($500).

[bobstad]

Got a new cap for $6

I went out last night and easily found a new replacement cap at a chain auto parts store for $6. Not exactly the same which has a wider flange; though a good fit none the less. I think I'll pick up a spare one too, the next time I have a chance.

Since there is leakage from somewhere behind the timing belt now, this is probably the reason I hear some clattering noises on intermittent fairly rare occasions, which is what had me lift the hood to see what was going on after driving about five hundred miles with the wadded up rag plugging the fill hole.

Either the crank or cam seal or both leak, which began quite awhile ago now. I plan on changing them whenever the timing belt is changed, I did at 100,000 miles with the original one; so within the next 25,000 miles, as the replacement has about 75,000 miles. Fudging a little on the recommended 60,000 mile replacement interval, since not an "interference" type set-up.

I'm one of the world's worst persons for doing any variety of chores, no doubt due to back pain from spinal disease early in life and as a juvenile leaving with with atrophied musculature; so that even as a twelve year-old my father would accuse me of "procrastination" often and once mentioned my "five minute attention span" when I'd be reading Dickens novels from cover to cover in a night, which may've reflected his war time service in the navy as someone devoted to being problematic with the officer class I'm sure helped create a good deal of his persona as well as my own, as a bit of a punk and certainly a punk appreciative person.

I'm usually forced to navigate life as if able-bodied, and was raised in a culture where if a person needed work done on their car, bike, motorbike or whatever; usually this was something they had to do themselves, which is actually quite a complex ethos of various values some of which I support and others I think wildly questionable.*

Anyway, I was sure happy to find these caps are readily available; imagining myself having to deal with wrecking yards that are so limited locally because of the exclusively strict regulations in this county.

Also nice to learn in this thread about what that noise likely is I've been hearing off and on, infrequently; which must be the valves clattering a little, seems a good surmise from what has been suggested here.

The car is such an excellent running vehicle with 175,000 miles, I'm always thinking that there should be plenty more miles left to go without too much major maintenance. The spark plugs whenever I check those to clean, re-gap or replace them, always look in great condition; and gas mileage has consistently been excellent, which with SR-155-13 tires I find accurate between 35 to over 40 mpg on the open road depending upon conditions and the speed I drive at.

*Dealing with a '66 VW "square-back" sedan I more or less lived out of a dozen years from '82-'94 made a pretty good amateur mechanic of me, I'd already worked at quite a bit before then from time to time on various other vehicles of my own.

One of my "works of art" so to speak doing that, which had become quite a distinctive low-income person's car in many respects by the time sold for $200 to young Todd Molyneux in Spokane, WA. Son of the criminal couple depicted in the book and movie The French Connection, born after those events whose father had been a friend of the famous four-engine Chrysler hemi dragster builder Tommy Ivo.

Todd then was also an aspiring Latin percussionist and successful local music promotor; who in high school had won one of the prestigious Chase youth awards given city wide to high school seniors in Spokane, in the business category. His father died in NYC when he was five and mother in Spokane when he was fourteen; one of four young men raised without fathers all the same age living more or less as paupers who were all quite bright as youth, I'd been involved with significantly in that town's tiny Peaceful Valley neighborhood, and befriended by.

I purchased the VW from another colorful character about my age or a little older, like Todd also a serious amateur mechanic as a multi-tasking careerist, Jay Warell of Oakview, CA. Jay once had me give him a massage because I was irked the car had bad synchromeshes in second gear, I bought without a test drive; revealing how a great white shark had him in that fish's jaws, from scars below each buttock to under each arm pit. He escaped by poking the shark in the eye with his diving knife; he'd noticed just before he was hit, glancing over one of his shoulders while diving for illegal abalone off the coast of Santa Barbara. Doubtless, driving his knife in the shark's eye in a reflexive manner just as he was bitten into.

Someone, Jay, you could call "unsavory" without being too offensive. I later heard in Spokane, an excellent musician from Samoa play singing and accompanying himself on guitar who I only met once or twice, who for whatever reasons was stone deaf I only discovered in conversation since he had to see me to read my lips. He told me that was the only way Jay could've escaped.

I much dislike working on cars; but, also always have a feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction doing so once I'm finished. Similar to how often getting on the road is really hard to get motivated for, though once underway a good feeling too. I've even dreamt of Gypsy vardos; the name for the homes on wheels drawn by a horse, which have been used at times by Roma; so imagine there could be alternatives other than motor vehicles for my seeming sometimes way of life. Which at times can be so unfairly romanticized which has always been an adaptation to difficult circumstances, without other alternatives.

I've been strongly associated with the environmentalist movement since the early '70s when I knew some of the people organizing the first Earth Day then. Which really dominated my life for the next two decades or so, when there was a lot more ad hoc and imaginative activity in that respect; an era when people had much more faith in everyone's taking up a collective responsibility for the environment than now, which I've suffered the die-hard death struggles of that are still on-going, as an addictive and difficult phenomena. As someone involved in Communism too, the fact of an older brother's birthday who died of infant disease the day he was born, and V. I. Lenin's birthday also being April 22nd seem significant. Like the way the hammer and sickle are evocative of the star and crescent of Islam, which I've imagined portraying the earth as the crescent with the star a celestial body on a collision course with earth, rather than the moon in a particular phase having to do with Ramadan; which even one blind outspoken Muslim cleric mentioned in Robin Wright's book SACRED RAGE, seems feasibly imaginative about.

Really weird, is how in the repair industry there are so many varying attitudes about amateur mechanics. One of the strangest I ever found was in Oakland, CA in the mid '90s; where a person is treated like a criminal if shopping in one of the fairly rare hardware stores there, as if mechanical knowledge is typically known to be likely to be turned to a nefarious purpose: From an establishment and seemingly related to racism, point of view.

Hey, when I go "off-topic" I do try to keep the most pertinent commentary of my posts at the beginning. Another dumb day when I should be trying to get my apartment ready for the annual inspection for a continuing federal rent subsidy; which is a dreadful and discouraging chore I have to accomplish before January 2nd. I wonder what the eviction laws are like here? I'd guess they let people bid on the value of one's possessions, in exchange for cleaning an apartment out; and/or the owner is allowed to keep whatever they want, as compensation for ejecting someone?