'09 S-60 Oily Spark Plugs

[GentleG65]

Greetings,
I recently purchased a 2009 Volvo S-60 2.5 T, with 96,500 miles, and i should of done better homework on the car! I pull off the valve cover and timing belt cover, only to find that the timing belt has small cracks on the belt and the teeth are crumbling. Then i pull the spark plugs out, i find oil in all of the spark plug chambers, and on the spark plugs themselves. Going from left to right, only the first chamber was saturated in oil up and filled the chamber, whereas the other 4 chambers were dry, and only the plugs were oily.
The tips on all the spark plugs were burnt, ashy, and smelled burnt. The coils had white residue inside of the tips as well .
Is this a death sentence for an engine? I did some reading and it could be a number of things- faulty map sensor, valve seals, head gasket, pcv system , the list goes on and on. I also read it could be the valve cover gasket and the o ring seals on the spark plugs; however, i am confused on whether Volvo's even have valve cover gaskets in the first place??
What do i do first? How do i go about fixing, and figuring out the issues ? Any advice would be very helpful!
Thank you ,
Emmanuel A

[jonesg]

do you get any blue smoke out the tail pipe, is the oil in the combustion cyls or just in the spark plug wells.
if its in the wells its probably the oil filler cap, a new gasket for the cap is $6.

Thats probably the original timing belt, might as well swap it out and know where you stand.

[scot850]

Car has obviously seen a lot of neglect or has been sitting for some time.

Oil on the top of the engine is usually caused by the oil seal on the oil fill cap leaking. These harden and shrink allowing oil to leak out and it usually affects cylinder #2 and #3 the worst but will work it's way along the block. I have just done this on my friends son's S60 for the same reason.

Also check the pipe from the oil separator tank at the front of the engine that runs up to the top of the cylinder head. The original one was a piece of garbage consertina plastic that goes brittle and breaks up. It also goes hard where it gets clamped to the head near cylinder #2/3. In his case this had been replace by a piece of crap pipe made by URO that had gone so hard it would not seal. We replaced that with an undated rubber Volvo part.

Finally, if the car has had neglected oil changes or done a lot of short runs the PCV system could be blocked. Use a latex glove over the oil filler hole held in place with a tight rubber band. Start the engine (if safe to do so) and see if it inflates. If it does not you have dodged a PCV re-fresh and possible oil seal failure of cam seals, front and rear main seals.

Neil.

[Willber]

On my 2.4t its the stem seals. I get blue smoke after a long period of engine braking but none at startup, so look out for that. If no blue smoke will be a seal somewhere else and hopefully a simple / cheap fix.

[Krons]

No death sentence but definitely do the glove test first to check condition of PCV system as mentioned above. My 08 2.5T needed a PCV replacement when I bought it plus had old and hard oil cap seal also mentioned above.

Definitely need to change the timing belt as if that goes the engine could easily be trashed.

If PCV is ok then you should be good with new timing belt service, plugs and a cleanup of the oil.