Rings around Saturns

Smokin and Misfires

The 1.9 liter Saturn engines from the early 90's to the late 90's was a success and failure in many ways.  However, its successes were marred by a couple of things.  One of these things is the constant usage of oil.  Every 1000 miles (1600 km) the engine will burn a quart (.9 liters) of oil.  The first thing you will go looking for is an oil leak.  There isn't one. You will also notice that the oil you just changed is dirty as heck.  If that doesn't push your meditation to achieve calmness nothing will.  

It turns out that the pistons on these cars was included without a proper oil scraper relief hole.  That being said, when the oil scraping rings wipe the cylinder, the oil has no where to go and gets burned.  Eventually, these rings get carbon build on them and they stop scraping oil all together causing a nice white smoke to come out of your tail pipe.  Here's a look at the piston:

As you can see, there is no hole through the piston for the oil rings to scrape oil through, only the holes on the side.   This is not enough to keep the rings from sticking and eventually burning oil like crazy.  Aside from replacing the rings and putting the engine back together, there is no real fix to this.  There are aftermarket pistons with the holes drilled for the oil available that will probably solve the problem though.  In the meantime, try not to worry about the oil burning.  Just keep topping it off and drive it normally.  

The other problem I have had with older Saturns involves the ignition system.  If you try to put in platinum spark plugs or change out the coils for better aftermarket ones, you will get a camshaft sensor code and your engine light will come on. Why???  Well, it turns out that these cars have a sensitive ignition system that only works with the original system.  Putting in advanced spark plugs will cause a misfire and an camshaft sensor code to pop up, even though there is no cam sensor!  Put in copper old school spark plugs, and original coil packs or you will be ripping out the last hair on your head trying to figure it out.  (And that aint good for your Zen)