blow-by good or bad?

[97proLX]

i just took in the protege to PDQ to change my oil and they checked my air filter and there was a oil spot on the filter about the size of a quarter. its only about 3 months old(the filter) is this normal with these cars?
is there any way to reduce this?
thanks

 

[turbonium959]

That could be either some as simple as you having sucked something up from the outside, or you could have a serious problem if your oil made that far, agaist air flow, through all the piping, on your air filter. Take off some of the hoses, and see if there is oil on in there.

 

[Midnightblue97]

Turbo is right, I highly doubt that the blow by gasses would be able to travel agains the air flow to get to the filter.
You want to check for blow by in one of these cars, look at the butterfly valve in the throttle body and the latter part of the intake hose.

 

[BlueMonsta]

i dunno if the engine intake design is still similar to gen 1s but
for our intake, oil can actually get leaked into the intake.

i dunno how to explain it without pics, but I was changing my air filter, and my mechanic explained it to me.

Unused air (dunno how they filter out unused air), is sent back into the intake and sometimes oil comes along or something like that

 

[Sirkbac]

Most cars have a crankcase breather line that routes back into the airbox. That would be how the oil got there. Look at the filter and see where the spot lines up and if there are any hoses that connect to the airbox near it. Most likely will lead back to the crankcase.