Cracked alloy sump – plastic metal fix?

My folks hit a sleeping policeman or maybe a pothole and whacked the alloy sump on their Passat. There is an inch or so crack that is weeping oil. As a temporary measure, is there a plastic metal or epoxy resin I can use to seal it?

Try Chemical metal. Its a 2 part epoxy like goo that is supposed to be bang on for that type of job .

You might have to drain the oil, and de=grease then wazz the oil back in.
Might get away with just a degrease around the general area . depends how fast its coming out

My mate did the plymouth – dakar a few years ago and rebuilt a K series rover sump tis way . They did have get creative with the oil as no catch tank was available ( car on side )

I’ve used Milliput to repair a hole in a motorbike gearbox. Not just a crack, I could actually look inside and see the gears turning.
It worked perfectly and lasted for years.
There’s various brands of similar epoxy putty type stuff. They’re probably all made in the same factory anyway.

I’ve done the exact repair you need on a sump.Chemical metal,18 months ago on a v6 tdi lump.no leaks since,didnt drain the sump,ran it up a kerb,degreased with thiners,two layers of the magic paste,I seem to have an uncle Robert 😉

I’ve just used unibond metal epoxy on my aluminium sump on a 10pm crack and it’s worked great.

My advice: drain the sump and make surethat the sump base (from outside) is spotlessly clean. Use thinner/cleaner/whatever you think necessary. Roughen the area with sandpaper and then mix/apply the resin.

Applying the resin to a dirty/contaminated surface will increase the chance of it not holding.

I had a hairline crack in the bottom of my gearbox and sealed it with Captain Tolley’s Creeping Crack Cure[/url] – titter ye not, it’s amazing stuff!

It’s the consistency of milk out of the bottle so that it capillarys into the crack even if you use it upside down!

Use brake cleaner to degrease it and, like others have said, drain the oil and leave the car parked on a slope with the crack at the high end to stop it leaking through.

Thanks folks.

The crack was like the cut you’d get from a knife, the oil was seeping through it. The dipstick showed empty but there was still about a litre and a half left in the sump.

I got some chemical metal epoxy stuff. Cleaned up the crack area, sanded with emery paper, degreased with brake cleaner and put a decent gob of goo over the crack.

The sump plug thread was ovalised, I’ve got a mate coming to elicoil it in the morning.

Panic over and breathe.

Most of our buses have had the aluminium sump plug threads stripped by now.
We just drill them out and tap them to a bigger size and rely on the trickle of oil as it’s still draining to flush the swarf out.
We’ve never had an engine damaged by swarf contamination.