During my pre-season oil change I thought I'd address my dripping taco plate. Well, of course, in so doing, I made it worse. What was once a few drops, now is many drops.

• I used a new aluminum washer between the sender and the plate threads
• a new red o-ring around the plate
• a new paper gasket between plate and cover
• new copper crush washers between bolts and cover, with the seam on the crush washers facing the ground
• torqued to 9 ft-lbs using my torque wrench
• everything was purchased from PP, no FLAPS specials or weird stuff I made

so....WTF? I would like to avoid smearing goo (permatex, rtv, whatever) all over the plate and my case, but if that's what it takes to get the thing to seal, I guess I will.

Any other suggestions?

HELP PLEASE I want to drive this car.

draganc had a problem recently with his taco plate leaking.
It turned out that the plate was undersize (& out of round iirc) by enough that the o-ring didn't compress sufficiently.

It wasn't leaking nearly as badly before, so my guess is it's not undersized. Should replacing with new seals cause this?

I think i'm going to drain the oil, disassemble, and clean everything really well, then reassemble. Maybe I'll run the car with the rear off the ground and watch to see where it's leaking out.

Plate has to be absolutely flat ... many get tweaked using a screwdriver to remove. I laid it on a flat plate to make sure.

I cleaned mine thoroughly with brake cleaner and assembled it dry.

I also used studs to mount it rather than the bolts.

check out my link and dimensions:

http://www.914world.com/bbs2/index.php?sho...=113674&hl=

a new plate is did the trick for my leak.

d

So, I disassembled and cleaned the taco plate per Mark's suggestion above, as I had not done this previously. Before cleaning it, I thought the plate was painted black.

WRONG

As I soaked it in carb cleaner and scrubbed with a nylon brush, I came to see that the color was grey. Over the next 40 mins or so I removed all kinds of past sins -- gasket maker, papery stuff...who knows.

I then put a thin coat of permatex on either side of the sealing ring for the temp probe itself. I used no other goop.

I reused the gasket between the plate and cover since I didn't have another one handy and it was in fine shape -- only been installed for a few days, after all.

I used new copper crush washers under the bolt heads, and reused my 4-day-old orange o-ring.

Ran it up on stands for a half hour, ran it into third gear a few times during that time, turned it off, came back after an hour...

Dry as a bone underneath

Looks like I'll be taking it to work tomorrow!

(provided it doesn't snow)

That's the way I did it! Wish I could have helped you sooner.

Sounds like someone might need to get a new prescription on the glasses ......

Rich