Hey all.

New to the site. Try to do some of my own work, so I'll be on here to get tips & pointers mostly, but don't have a lot of knowledge so will probably only contribue questions and steal from your experience. I just got my wife a 2006 Mazda 3s (got a steal on it used). Since it was used, first order of buisness was to do the basics; rotate tires, change oil, change air filter, etc.

So, changing the oil , and in a rush. It has the cartridge-type fileter, which means the metal housing of the oil filter is attached to the engine, and you loosen a plastic cap that allows you access to the filter. In that plastic cap is a 'drain plug.' I drained the oil through the drain plug, and not much came out. I thought, 'boy, and I glad I'm doing this now, this car has almost no oil in it!' I also thought that I might have jacked the car up too high (I get a little claustraphobic), so, don't do that next time. Did the change, went off on my merry way.

Later get a call from the wife, her new car is smoking like hell. Get over there, and I had forgotten to put the cap back on top, so it had thrown some oil on the engine. Damn. OK, fix that. Still smoking, and bogging out a bit. Dawns on me that maybe I didn't get the oil out, and now it's got way too much oil in it.

Long story short, that was exactly the case. Turns out that on this style engine there are 2 drain plugs; one to drain out the filter (which I did use) and one to drain out the pan (which I had not), meaning I dropped 4.5 quarts of fresh oil on 4.5 quarts old. So, I drain some out (ever try to just partially drain the oil pan? Not fun.) and sure enough it quits smoking. So I got get *another* 4.5 quarts of oil and do a complete change.
Question is, is there something else that I need to now look at to make sure I didn't damage it? A friend mentioned that the likely problem was oil being sucked up through the PVC valve; should I try to replace that? Some other component? Assuming the cat converter isn't fouled (didn't drive it smoking for very long....).

Just trying to figure out if too much oil would have damanged another component that now I need to fix. Thanks for any helpyou can offer.

 

I agree on the PCV, you always have to drain oil from both the filter and the pan. I suspect many of your cars ran with somewhat high oil levels...think about it, the oil (if not circulating through the engine) has to sit somewhere, and the filter certainly doesn't have 4.5 quarts capacity. Also, the vehicle should be sitting level, otherwise you won't get all of the oil out.

Keep an eye out for any codes getting tripped (Check Engine Light), but if you're not leaking or burning anything at this point, you probably didn't damage any of the seals or the oil pump. I'd think you should be fine now.

 

Credit to you, you came public with your story to that others can learn from it. Never once you mentioned the engine dipstick ( yes, there is one on every car). Having checked the dipstick you would have noticed the overfilling. If you collected only a little bit of oil (thinking that was all of it), that engine should have been toast by then. Check the oil level bi-weekly. If low a bit, change pcv valve. Check tail pipe, if condensation (water) is coming out, catalyst is ok.