Hello list, my car suffered an almost catastrophic oil leak. I was driving on the freeway around 60mph when I noticed a huge blue smoke-cloud behind the car. The interior began to fill up with smoke too. Pretty scary that was, ugh. I pulled over and opened the hood and saw the whole engine bay covered with oil all over. I was like 3 miles from home and had a spare 1 gal oil in the trunk, poured in and drove away slowly. Thanks god I managed to drive it home. I inspected the engine, removed the plastic covers and found a huge oil leak at the intake camshaft pulley. The sealing ring came out of its place which made me think there must be something wrong there. I noticed that the intake pulley is – I have no better description for that – 'empty' while the exhaust pulley has an internal part. The intake is simply a wheel bolted on the camshaft, but the exhaust is a complex part. At the exhaust this inner part keeps the sealing ring at place, but there's nothing like that at the intake. Is it normal, or it's just the 'fingerprint' of a previous mechanic?

 

There has to be something in there or the seal would have fallen out a long time ago.
Install new seals and clean the Vent box system and install a new flame sheild.

 

Here are the pics. The orange ring is the seal, as you can see the intake and the exhaust pulleys are different.

 

I believe it is like a balancer.It all should come off once you remove the pulley.

It also looks like the timing is 1 tooth off.The little lines on the pulleys where the white marks are needs to match up with the little knotches in the cover.

 

I took a look at a friend's 960 and the intake pulley is the same as mine, they've got different part numbers too, so I guess this is normal. What forced the seal out of its place was the crankcase ventilation systems failure, the box is clogged or whatever. I need to get access to that and give it a good cleaning.
However, the more important for me right now is the timing. I feel the car underperforms with low mpgs and low high-end power. At lower rpms the car performs adequately. I don't really want to remove the top covers of the camshafts because I don't have special tools to put it back, so the question is how can I determine if it is correct now or not? Could it be the culprit of a burned valve I bought the car with? Maybe the last time a mechanic changed the timing belt he did it wrong...

 

Someone has had the engine apart before I can tell by looking at the one picture of the cam.The close up picture.Someone marked the pulley and the cam.The only way to check it out properly is to remove The caps out of the back of the head and install a tool to align the cams.

To start try to align it the best you can by the marks.Get the crank one lined up and see which one is lined up exact.I modified your picture.The yellow lines need to be aligned with the blue arrows.

See how it looks from there they might have just had one of the cams off one tooth.

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