Hello
I pulled a spark plug wire on our (new to us) 2000 civic LX and it had oil on it. Is this normal? I've never seen a car where the spark plugs sit in a 'wet' area, with no barrier/gasket to keep them dry. Do we have a bad or missing gasket somewhere? When I look in the oil filler cap opening, I can see all of the mechanical inerd's and it wide open in there, vs. a filler tube or barrier of some sort - also kind of unusual to me.

The car runs fine, but it does burn some oil.

Thanks

 

Under the bottom of each spark plug well, there is a round gasket about the size of a half-dollar (remember those ?). They seal the s/p well to the cylinder head, and do get dried out and leak over time. That's your problem, I'd bet, as I have had it before myself. To replace them, the valve cover needs to be removed so you might as well get a new valve cover gasket, too. What I did was live with one leaking until I did a timing belt replacement.
I'd just remove that spark plug periodically and the oil would drain down into the cylinder, then reinstall the plug. The oil would be burned off when the car was started..a little smoke but nothing harmful. The oil that did accrue in the s/p well didn't cause any issues that I was aware of.

 

The wires go down through metal tubes (cast into the head) which are supposed to stay dry. There is a gasket between the top of each tube and the inside of the valve cover, so that the oil splashing around in the cam and rocker area doesn't get into the tube.

With that said, a little oil in there isn't going to hurt anything.