Thread: Td5 oil leak - turbo area

I have had a relatively new sump gasket poke out at the rear and leak where you describe,,but that was pooring out . I also checked the sump bolts a year after a new gasket and
at least 5 were loose...

Just to add my recent experience to this thread. I had ongoing but suddenly significant oil leak/s on the Td5 left (passenger) side. Messy, oil everywhere. Also had a coolant leak. Excellent LR independent mechanic in Nerang (GC) said it was the oil filter housing gasket. Being skint I do the work i can myself and pulled the turbo, both centrifugal and cartridge oil filter housings and then the oil cooler. I found blue silicon compound around the centrifugal filter housing oil drain (both at housing and sump ends) and ****ty old gaskets with over torqued screws, suggesting a previous leak. So to address the oil leak, I replaced the metal gaskets for the oil cooler and the cartridge housing, the o-ring for the oil passage between the oil cooler and the centrifugal oil filter housing, the gaskets for the oil drains for the turbo and the centrifugal filter. As a matter of course I used new exhaust manifold and exh down pipe gaskets for the turbo. And after some hard driving no evidence oil leaks. Nada. Zip. So now I guess my Td5 will rust like a normal car. So..I recommend anyone with an oil leak in that area to replace all these gaskets, as they have to removed to get to the oil cooler and the gaskets are cheap (and should be replaced with each and every removal, according to RAVE, which may not have happened in the vehicles past).
The oil cooler coolant chamber was not pretty, with some deposits. I put a little OHT coolant concentrate on them and them scraped them off with a sharpened chopstick. Was that the right thing to do? I have no idea. (All my previous vehicles being air-cooled).
An interesting thing with that, this being a 1999 D2, the oil cooler had its external coolant spigot connected (rather than plugged as in later D2s) to the hidden pipe that goes back to the radiator bottom circuit. Later vehicles, this forum tells me, had the spigot plugged as the later radiator had one circuit, unlike early D2 radiators which had a separate circuit for the fuel cooler and oil cooler coolant 'drain' through the hidden pipe. Anyways, all stock replacement radiators have the oil cooler spigot blanked (I learned when my Nissen unit arrived) and the hidden pipe and the 'drain from the oil cooler become redundant, an appendix as it were. SO I found that the radiator I removed already had a blank spigot (must have been changed out) so the oil cooler had had this 1 metre long coolant appendix attached for some years. The rubber coolant pipe from the oil cooler spigot was in bad nick and had plenty of coolant deposits. Maybe this was to do with the hidden pipe (running back to the blank spigot at the base of the radiator) being a coolant dead end and getting no sugar with coolant flushing and changes? Anyway I cleaned the spigot up with a file and blanked it with a $5 kit (to be checked regularly as it sits in a very hot spot) as recommended on a few forums. I just thought I'd add so that anyone digging down to the oil cooler on an older D2 for the first time might have a heads up.
I don't know much but i do know that changing all those gaskets made one very very leaky D2 into a pristine father-in-law's-driveway-safe machine.