Too much oil, need to know how bad I've screwed up
Had someone help me with my car because engine was making a tapping sound, turned out it was lack of oil. Added oil, apparently car burns some oil (1997 Hyundai Elantra, not sure i it actually burns a lot because haven't had the time to figure it out). The engines never smoked or anything though. Am in need of an oil change and made a relatively long trip this weekend, so added some oil. Since my normal oil is black, when I read the dipstick I didn't realize I added way too much. Checked oil to see how much I burned today, and saw I way overfilled, probably by about an inch, not more than an inch and a half. When I was driving today (relatively heavily, ran it from 0-60 as fast as it would go), a friend and I noticed a terrible burning smell that only lasted for a few moments on two separate occasions. After reading about what happens i you overfill, have I likely caused terrible damage? Drove it to work tonight afterwards and absolutely nothing abnormal happened. Barring extensive damage, can I afford to wait until next payday (5 days) to get the oil changed, or do I need to borrow and do it now?
Answers
Hi Lewisac6, this issue was already covered in another post: http://forums.edmunds.com/discussion/3698/honda/x/can-too-much-oil-damage-your-engine
Bottom line is you if you are handy with a wrench I would drain some of the oil out of the oil pan so you don't have to spend any money until the change. There are pump/hose kits you can buy to suck oil out through the dipstick, but then you might as well spend that money on the oil change. Hope that helps.
Trying to remove the oil-drain-plug to release a 'little' oil is asking for trouble. You would likely end up with a HUGE mess as you try to get the plug back into position as oil drains down your arm.
No need to drain "from the pan". It is trivial to push a small-diameter hose down the dipstick tube and draw it out with a vacuum-pump. Heck I have performed 100s of oil-changes using the "topside" method. (From under the hood without ever getting under the vehicle.) Of-course, the location of your oil-filter dictates how well topside oil-changes will work on your car.
With a topside hand-pump oil-sucker - I have also changed xmission-fluids, differential-fluids, snowmobile chain-oil, brake-juice and many other tasks.