my new mileage monster.
 

well after a few weeks of searching i finally got what i consider one of the better fe cars thats still affordable. its a 1994 saturn sl1. this thing is mint and is easily the nicest beater ive owned. its got 110k on it and very few options. it does have a/c and p/s but thats it. everything else is bottom of the line. im going to start a new gas log on it after i break it in to my style but right now im getting mid 30's for mpg. im hoping for around 40ish before i take a wrench to it. ive got a wai and grill block planned for it as well as switching the fluids to synthetic. gonna do the basics too like filling the tires up and stuff. not much in the way of aftermarket to get better mpg's so im gonna have to get creative.

the sl1's are known for their mileage abilities. one thing is to maybe do the tune up things like plugs and wires or what not depending on what the previous owners did with it.

at 110k on the car, it should last a while. keep it under 2500rpm (maybe 2000) and drive it easy. I think they were stick shifts. you should easily be able to achieve the 40s. that being said, every car is different so take your time with it.

check oil every fill up + go to saturnfans.com for good advice to fix your car

ya im finding out about the oil thing. some of my other beaters have used oil too but they were just tired, these saturns just drink it. their are a few tricks i guess to loosening up the oil rings to curb it abit. im just gonna watch it for a while and go from their. the other cars i just dumped used oil into and all was fine but this car is a little too nice for that.
the car just had a tune up and new tires put on but i may play with it abit. id rather have a reusable type filter so if i can find one ill probably get it and i like experimenting with plugs (love side gapping) so ill probably ditch those too. im hoping to see decent gains by switching to syn oils. amsoil in the tranny (5sp by the way) and rotella t for the motor. of course itll only make oil consumption more of an issue so ill see if its worth it.
im really looking into the underdrive pullies for it. ive had amazing success with them on prior cars but i was looking for power then not fe. i believe they will work just as well for that purpose too. exhaust may be in the works too since the stock one is a little ratty. i think with a nice laid out system i may see some gains their as well.
+1 on the sarturnfans site. its great even if they all hate my car. no sohc love over their.

I second the saturnfans.com page... just completely avoid the "s-series Mods" section. Wow, scary stuff in there.

40's should be your average in no time. Check my garage entry for pics of a HAI and you can check my fuel log to see how much it helped.

The oil burning isn't really fixable w/o re-ringing. MMO soaks, Seafoam, ATF flush's... blah blah, waste of money. I've tried everything. The burning just gets worse and worse.

im loving the hai. im thinking of something along those lines since my stock setup is very different than yours. as for the oil im not too worried about it. i have seen some soot at the end of the tail pipe (which fell off today so im gonna need an exhaust soon) but i havent tracked oil consumption yet. the dipstick was on full when i got it so ill check it later. im already about 500 miles on this car and ive only really driven it for 3 days.
how many miles are on your saturn project84? im hoping to hit at least 200k with mine but itll be a lot of gas log entries before i do that.
im also trying to put off the change to syn fluids before i get a good baseline but my tranny hates the cold and i know a fluid change would stop that. gear shifting is very notchy and always grinds a little going into 5th until the car gets up to temp then everything is fine.
this tank is looking real good. im not doing any tricks but driving it like a normal person so i can really get a good idea of mpg. if i go by the gas gauge and base it off the last (and my first) tank full im doing much, much better. at the half way point on the first tank i was as 140miles, on this tank im not even their yet and already at 200. maybe ill do an early fill to see but id rather not.

I was thinking about the common Saturn oil burning issue. You would think that with a name like "Saturn", they would have good rings. Anyway...

Is there some kind of preventative maintenance that can be done to avoid the issue, or at least increase the pre-oil-burning life of the engine? Short oil change intervals / excessively expensive oil? Or would that not even help? (IMO it wouldn't be worth it anyway, dump in a quart every tank later vs. do lots of extra oil change labor now.)

supposedly its a severe engine design flaw. no oil drains in the pistons or something, i havent quite grasped it yet due to no photos. the route cause ends up being that the rings on the pistons get stuck and allow lots of blowby. the cheap fixes and gm's own solution to avoid warrenty claims is to soak the pistons with marvel mystery oil or gm's own cleaner which is basically mmo. its supposed to loosen the crud and rejuvinate the rings. seafoam and a atf flush are also common fixes. some swear they work other not but they all have the issue. i wasnt really aware of it when i bought the car, at least to its full extent.
heres the bulletin.
https://www.saturnfans.com/forums/showthread.php?t=38790


notice oil consumption is considered ok on your brand new car if it consumes less than a qt of oil 1500miles. whata bargin.

The owner's manual for the 1965 Mercury Comet Caliente (essentially a '65 Mustang drivetrain in a regular car body) that I had about 30 years ago stated that one quart per 1k miles was considered adequately low oil consumption...that was for a new car (after break-in).

1 quart per 1000 miles is specified as normal for brand new Volkswagens.

So if you have a relatively young S-series and want to prevent the ring damage, you should do the MMO soak and that may help?

Thanks. Cost was roughly $13 total and I still have enough of the dryer vent tubing to re-do it a few times if need be.

Check it ASAP!! lol really, every time you fuel up. Set the pump to slow and while you wait, pop the hood and check that oil.

A few days ago I was 152,500 give or take a few right at the moment.

Things I've replaced in the last 10k:

front control arms
rear sway bar endlinks
water pump
ECTS
valve cover gasket
(a whole lot of other things that are more routine maintenance based)

The above are good examples of failure points to be aware of.

Probably not. :o

Not to mention they stopped making them in '02. If someone was lucky enough to find one (own one) with less than 60k, I'd say sure, give it a try... otherwise, just drive it and plan on a re-ring somewhere between 150k-200k(with oil relief holes drilled into your pistons this time...) if you don't like oil consumption.

I really want to tear into it and do it myself but the price of other things starts adding up quickly.

timing assy
rings
pistons maybe
main bearings
oil pump
head bolts
gasket sets
replacement head or rebuild/valve job (cheaper to buy new head for $300)

total $700-$1,000

If you want to just tolerate the oil consumption (assuming it doesn't make the car fail emissions testing), is it ok to just keep topping it off? If so, is it ok to top it off with used oil from the last oil change?

Oil costs as much per quart as gasoline does per gallon, so a half a quart per tank is like dropping your FE average significantly...

I saw an SL1 for sale that could conceivably be my beater (unlikely, though) and now I'm curious.

Sounds about right... Just rebuilt a '98 SL2 a little over a year ago. Stuff does add up quickly (especially when you find out the motor/timing chain went because it appears they NEVER changed the oil and even the crank needs replaced, cylinders bored .030 over, cams replaced). All said and done I had about $1,600 in my rebuild, but the thing did not burn a drop of oil anymore... lol

I do not know if it would work or is one of the ways "recommended" on the forums (I did see you mention ATF though), but when I was big into rotaries, it was a common problem for the apex seals to stick. A "cheap" fix for this (did not ALWAYS work, but probably about 75% of the time would fix it) was to pull the spark plugs and use a syringe to put some ATF in the combustion chamber (and on the rotary, cycle the motor to get all three rotor faces/"combustion chambers") and let it sit overnight. Is this basically the ATF trick on the Saturns? (My family have owned a ton of Saturns, but never had the burning oil problem with any of them (family still has the ones in bold): '97 SL; '98 SL2; '99 SL1; '00 SL1; '01 SC1; '02 SL2; '03 Ion; '06 Vue V6 FWD; and '09 Astra XE

i dont see why used oil would be a big deal. my last beater was a kia and would gobble down 1qt every 1000 miles which ended up being almost weekly. i used old oil in it exclusively for well over 100k. the only time it saw new oil was every 10k when i did a major service. i did however change the filters every few thousand miles which was basically once a month. the motor still ran fine when i sold it with 150k on it but it had alot of other problems.
that being said id rather not use old oil but im not going to use new oil either. i call my old vehicles that burn oil my refineries. i just save all the oil from my oil changes and in they go. recently its been lawnmowers and such.

the atf trick goes 2 ways i guess. one is the way you mention ben and the other involves putting it in with the oil. some people say 1-2qts and run it that way for a few hundred miles and change it. ive also used kerosene in the oil before to get sludge out and it works real well. my other car is a sludge monster-01 saab 9-5.

Nice to see someone who has owned so many Saturns... I've only had this one myself, but I love 'em!! Sad to see them go. :( Such a good commuter car.

Ben, its weird that you never experienced the burning oil problem. Were any of the cars well over 100k, like say 130k-150k? It seems to get substantially worse up in the higher numbers. Of the 4 different s-series you have, 3 of them are SOHC cars.

I've heard testimony (asked a question involving SOHC cars a week ago because I was looking at one) that the SOHC cars burn less/no oil. You can look the thread up if you want, I use the same name over there. Lots of guys chimed in to say they had no oil burning problems w/ their SOHC cars, one guy owns both SOHC and a DOHC car, said his DOHC drinks it like usual.

Luckily, I've never had a vehicle that consumed any significant amount of oil My K1500 goes through 1 quart in 5,000 miles, but since I change my oil at 5,000 I rarely add any. I suspect the bulk of that quart was wiped off of the dipstick since I check the oil at every fillup. I used to have a problem on my Regal where oil kept being pushed into the air cleaner through the PCV system. I tried filling the cylinders with kerosene overnight to see if it was stuck rings, but later found it was cracked rings when the motor was torn down for a rebuild.

I cannot really say the miles on most of them as they are/were my brother's and sister's cars.

The DOHC I owned ('98 SL2) did not burn any oil, but I did a complete rebuild with the block bored .030 over and only drove it for about 12,000 miles before I sold it. The other DOHC ('02 SL2) is my sister's and I doubt it is to the 100K range yet. Of the SOHC cars, the '00 SL1 was my sister's that I just mentioned and was a lease that she turned in for the DOHC, the '97 SL and '99 SL1 are my two brothers who are in college (hand me down cars, the '97 SL was mine at one point). Really overall have not had any major problems with them. I think the most "major" problem any had was the '99 SL1 had a leaking slave cylinder and it was leaking onto the clutch and then the clutch burnt up from the slipping.

Guess hearing it affects the DOHC cars more makes me feel better that my '01 SC1 I just got is SOHC... lol

This is the really strange part...

The pistons and rings are identical in both the SOHC engines and the DOHC... the block is the same, the head is the only difference.

Why would one burn oil and the other not? I haven't questioned "Wolfman" or "OldNuc" on Saturnfans to this point, but I'm sure one of them has some type of scientific reason.

I always personally thought it was the valve seals... Never heard about "rings" causing so many problems until the Saturnfans board. Not saying they do not know what they are talking about, but I still think it makes more sense that it would be the valve seals. If people are going to the trouble of drilling holes in the pistons though, they probably already started with the valve seals because those can be done a lot easier than the piston rings. But that would explain better why the DOHC seems to do it more often than the SOHC even with them both using the same block.

Again, I am not saying that is it, I have never really looked into it much since the cars my family has owned has not done it (and I am the "resident mechanic" on the cars.... lol)

well at least i have some good news on the oil front. after over 1000miles my oil level hasnt moved. thats mostly highway miles too.
since my exhaust fell off yesterday im gonna need a new one asap. i bandaged it together so i can still drive it and it should work as well as before but its gonna go sometime. im going to try to get as many gas logs on this exhaust then get a custom made one to finally put to rest in my mind that a better exhaust can improve mpg. i dont know if i have the stock exhaust on their now but its crinkle bend not crush bend which leads me to believe its one its second cheap exhaust already. im gonna stick to the oe size of 1 7/8" and have one at least crush bent with a nice muffler.