ok I'm confused here.

My car has always leaked/seeped a little oil, maybe an ounce or 2 over the winter, nothing major. Just an annoyance, not really an actual problem.

Sometime around september or october, I checked my oil and it was way low. I added a quart and all was well. Sometime in late november I put the car away for the winter, after driving another 1000 miles max.

A couple weeks ago I moved my car to put it on the lift and take care of some of my "winter projects". This involved pulling it out of the garage, and pulling it back in to the next stall, where the lift is. When I pulled out, there was a decent sized oil puddle under it. I let the car sit overnight and went out the next morning to start working and there was a puddle about the diameter of a basketball under it. Both puddles were definitely engine oil. The oil pan, front of the transmission, timing cover, sides of the engine...all had oil on them. I cleaned up the oil puddle, and went on to do some suspension work...finished that all up, and over the past couple weeks it's dripped a few drops on the floor but that's about it. I don't know if that leaked out or was just residual oil all over everything that was slowly dripping down.

This morning I put in some of that UV dye to check for leaks, let it sit a while, saw nothing, ran the engine for a few minutes, idling most of the time, bringing the revs up a few times, shut it off...and now about 8 hours later there's still no signs of anything leaking. Nothing is showing up with the blacklight (at least not that I can tell - for no real reason I looked around with a blacklight before adding the dye, and alot of stuff seems to glow a little just because it's a light color or whatever...that didn't change, and none of it seems to be the orange color that the dye glows). A few more drops of oil on the ground, but again that might just be dripping down from previously - I didn't clean off the engine yet.

So I checked the oil level...and it was above the full mark . Thing is, the built-in dipstick wiper is kinda cracked, and it'll come off with the dipstick if you don't hold it in place...so if it's not pushed back on and seated properly, the dipstick can't go all the way in and you won't get an accurate reading. But I checked the level about 10 times, with the wiper properly seated, and it's definitely high. There's absolutely no fuel smell to the oil, so I doubt a leaky injector is raising the oil level by dilluting it with gas...

So the only thing I can think of is...if the dipstick wiper and dipstick weren't properly seated before, and I wasn't paying much attention, the oil level woulda looked low even though it was fine. So I added a quart of oil, bringing the level way up. This higher oil level caused a leak?, and left tons of oil on the floor. But it leaked out enough that now the oil level is back to (almost) normal, so everything's working fine and there's no leak . Does that sound feasible? And if so, now that the oil level is normal again, is it possible that it won't come back (since it doesn't seem to leak now)? Or wtf...am I just nuts?

I guess the only thing I can really do is change the oil (it's about due anyway), clean/degrease everything really good, and keep an eye on it and see if it comes back

 

I had the same exact thing on mine, and I went down the same course as you did. I noticed a tiny leak at the intake but no worries since I am pulling that off soon eough, but then when I switched on accident to semi-synthetic...my leak dissapeared.

And I KNOW that that makes absolutely NO sense.