A6 3.0t Avant: Persistent Oil Leak (Please help ANYONE)
 

Greetings AW, don’t post here very often, but when I have in the past lots of you have helped me through various issues. I hope this one will be no different.

Our A6 3.0t Avant has been dealing with oil leaks for months, and I am running out of options here. I’ll go over a brief history of what has been done to try and remedy this:

1st: Valve covers gaskets (they WERE leaking, but this was fixed, however leaks continued).
2nd: New Oil Pan, Level Sensor, and oil cooler gasket…
Now that these items were out of the way, I figured the leak was coming from somewhere on the top of the motor.
3rd: Mechanic (who is an Audi tech) and I, narrowed it down to the Oil filter housing, since it was dripping oil where it meets the back of the engine block. He replaced that, got it home yesterday… BAM! Stupid oil droplets still on the driveway, and now it looks like the oil is dripping near the front of the engine toward the passenger side.

NOTE: He cleaned the motor from underneath as best he could, and the oil on my driveway is fresh oil (it just had an oil change), so it seems highly unlikely to me that it’s old oil that had already leaked just “coming down”.

At this point I’m totally stumped and kind of disheartened, been dealing with this for months and due to personal reasons it has been difficult shelving out the cash for no resolve.

I don’t think it’s the rear timing covers or the rear main seal because if it was, I’d think that the leak would be at the rear of the motor (which it isn’t). I’ve tried looking at engine diagrams/schemas and there is nothing I could find (except bad Valve covers) which can created a leak toward the front of the engine on the passenger side.

To be ever more precise, when you get under the car, you can see the oil is somehow getting onto the Alternator and dripping down to the oil pan and then making its way to the ground.

Anybody know? Because I’m stumped at this point.

Thanks.

I am not sure if this is true with the 3.0 but on the 3.2 we have the issue with the cam "girdles" eventually leaking. This can usually be confirmed by finding oil in the spark plug wells though I can imagine cases where that may not be true yet still be leaking.

With no more information than your location description, I would be looking at the vacuum pump at the front of the passenger side cylinder bank. Common leak source.