Thanks to cstarky and justincredible for pointing me to the oil filter housing gasket as the source of my oil leak. Pulled the IM over the long holiday week.
The good news. Replaced both oil filter housing gaskets/o-rings, replaced the PCV, and replaced the coolant temp sensor while I was in there (just recently got a fault for fan control that I traced to the sensor probably starting to go bad). BTW, that knock sensor bracket caused me a lot of heartaches trying to get the IM off. Needless to say, that bracket is now gone.
The bad news, I think I damaged the upper intake manifold gasket during disassembly. Car is running like crap at idle with both cyl 5 and 10 missing quite a lot. There’s an extremely loud whistling sound coming from the interface between the IM and the throttle body duct. Just ordered the gasket and will be replacing this weekend. Luckily this is a quick fix. The really bad news, found a couple of plastic pieces in the intake runners. Looks like I’ve got some damage to the intake manifold flaps. Don’t really want to spend a couple grand right now to replace. Will have to hope the damage is not too extensive. Prior to finding this, the car was running fine except for an exhaust O2 sensor fault. Wondering if there could be any connection.
