Oil or Soot Leak at Front of Engine

[RIDETHE]

I tried a search, and couldn't find anything like this. I have an '08 Jo 1, and last night, I thought I heard it making a faint clunking noise when I got off the freeway. When I started it this morning, it made a weird noise like it was missing, so I revved it once, and it went away. When I got home I noticed this in my driveway:



The patterns look more like coolant and soot than oil? I looked up underneath, and the fan coated the whole front of the engine in the stuff. All of the intake boots are dry. I've been throwing a code for thermostat performance for the past week because it's been running way cold. I figured one of the tstats was hung open. Now, I just got a glow plug code which is probably the cause of the miss on startup. It seems like it just blew this crap all over my driveway on startup, and got less severe when I drove off. Seems to run fine otherwise.

I'm going to pressure wash it next weekend to try and find the cause, but does anyone have an idea as to what this is? I feel like it may be something with the EGR. Hope it's not a front main seal or worse

[RIDETHE]

Pressure washed it down last night and pulled it into the garage. I crawled under it, and looked around for a few minutes. Behind the crank pulley was dry, so I don't think it's the front main. I was about to give up for the night when a trickle of blackish water started running down the crank pulley on the belt. It came from above the pulley where I couldn't see. I'm going to check the oil tonight, but I'm afraid I'm going to see water in it since I noticed the degas bottle is black. Anyone have an idea what this might be? Doesn't seem like the right area for a head gasket. Oil cooler maybe?

[04hdfatboy]

So you are getting oil in your degas bottle?

[RIDETHE]

Looks like it. I just noticed it leaving for work this morning. Looked pretty black.

[04hdfatboy]

You probably have a bad oil cooler. Usually if it goes bad you will get oil in the coolant because the oil pressure is higher.

[RIDETHE]

Yep! Radiator was about half full of oil, and the oil was almost gone. I thought it was soot because the fluid was floating the oil around so it didn't look like regular oil stains. Once I replace the thing, will flushing the system with Simple Green get everything cleaned out pretty well?

[04hdfatboy]

It should. I would flush with simple green, restore and restore plus. Then add a quality cat elc.