I've had my 91 XJ Sport with HO 4.0 for 3 years. now. I have done the Valve Cover, Oil Pan, and Rear seal thing, 2 times now. Both times the rear seal was toast. I figure it's just something I'll have to live with having an inline 6 cylinder motor i. e. lots of flex. I like the power and torque of the 4.0 for driving and 4wheeling so I'm good with this. I did buy one of the rubber/metal oil pan gaskets and it appears to be holding up good while the vavle cover regular rubber gasket has started to seep again. I'm hoping to find a rubber/metal gasket for that application before i change it again. Bottom line is from my experience the rear seal is just a bad design. Hope this helps.
Every 3 weeks or so mine has a little drop on the ground. My valve cover is leaking (not bad, just seeping out of the old gasket) in the back though, so that could be the issue (I sure hope it is).
Another culprit can be the oil filter adapter. Leaks from it travel down the rim of the oil pan to rear and can appear that they're coming from the rear main seal.
Yup, both those areas are known leak-prone spots on the XJ. Neither are all that hard to fix/replace though.
If it's the o-rings at the oil filter adapter, you can buy a new o-ring kit from the dealer, or maybe NAPA. Getting the filter adapter off the motor is the worst part of the job.
If it's the rear main, that's not really a hard job either, and new seals can get had from most auto parts stores: http://jeepin.com/features/rearmain
Also oil can leak from the distributor shaft and go down to that area. I had this problem once along with the oil filter adapter leak and rear main seal leak.
I've got a bunch of little oil spots all over the place, but not enough to drip after the Jeep has been sitting overnight. Looks like my oil pan is leaking in a few places, the oil filter arm has oil on it, and the rear main seal might be leaking as well. There is fluid on the transmission, but I haven't figured out yet what it is. Looks like I didn't tighten down the fittings to my trans temp sensor enough because there is a drop of fluid on that too. Even though I used teflon tape and thought I was gonna strip the fittings because they were so tight. Guess it's time to add gaskets to the list of mods.
Oh yeah, 1998 classic here too.
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