Help diagnose oil leak

Hey folks,

I've got a 2010 5.7 Sequoia and I recently moved from Toronto, Ontario to the Bay area in Cali. I had the cam towers resealed because while the truck was a unicorn find - a retired lawyer bought it new and moved to Mexico, recently returned for his wife's health problems, it has 26k miles on it. The truck is like new inside and out but because it never got old enough to start leaking under warranty, my mechanic in Canada spotted a little oil on the backs of the heads with the grey sealant and with the long drive, he resealed the whole top end.

I arrived today and I smelled a little burning rubber getting out, and poking around underneath noticed that there's oil coming down the bellhousing and onto the crossmember, with a few drops getting to the exhaust.

Other than this, there is no sign of any issue - no lights, no smoke, pulls awesome like always. Engine oil level is perfect.

I poked around and found that the inside passenger corner of the intake valley is wet with oil. The exhaust side looks dry, the front half of the bank looks dry, driver's side is dry.

I'm at a bit of a loss and talking to my mechanic, so is he. We got all new gaskets and even fasteners new from Toyota for the job. The PCV hoses over the area are dry. My first guess was that the PCV valve is stuck and that corner of the VC gasket was the weak link and it was spraying oil pressurized by crank blowby. But I pulled the PCV valve and it's in great shape, works perfect.

So I'm really at a loss what could be causing this. Can a brand new OEM VC gasket fail after only 2500 miles? And even then, I don't know how the oil got on the intake runner, I would expect a VC gasket to just leak down, not spray up.

Any ideas for where to start hunting?

Thanks in advance!

 

Bump. Ordered a VC gasket kit, will open it up this weekend. Hopefully it's just an installation defect. I'll add some permatex black inside the channel to be darn sure

 

Mystery solved. The tech is lucky I'm 2500 miles away now or I'd turn his outie into an innie. This suuucked, and thanks to you guys for the VC writeup giving the tip to use some permatex black as glue to hold the gasket in the channel. At least the tech had clear access to the head, if I didn't have that tip I would have given up probably and drained the coolant, gotten those pipes out and the wiring harness.

 

Wow that's some JV work there. Congrats on fixing it yourself.

 

Piss poor.

I hope you sent the same picture to your "mechanic" and requested a refund.