This all started happening about four months ago. My dad changed the oil in my car while I was gone for the weekend and ended up putting up too much oil back in. When I noticed that my car smoked under hard acceleration a few days later, I checked the oil and found out that he had overfilled the oil by a little bit. So I drained out the excess oil and hoped that it would stop smoking....well it never did.

This last weekend I tried to figure what conditions caused it to smoke. So I filled up the oil to the full line on the dipstick and drove about 160 miles (roughly 140 miles on the highway) total. At startup there is a big puff of blue smoke that disappears quickly (this has always happened ever since I bought the car 4 years ago). At idle and at a constant rpm there is no visible smoke. Completely babying the throttle and keeping the rpm below 1500 rpm during acceleration causes no visible smoke.

Any time I give it a good amount of throttle, it smokes. If I go above 1500 rpm during acceleration, it smokes until the rpms level out. If I'm already cruising at a steady 2800 rpm and then I gas it more, I get a cloud of smoke until my rpms level off. Going up hills causes it to smoke almost constantly.

At the end of my driving this weekend the oil was at 3/4 of the full line on the dipstick. Everything I can find on the internet says that blue smoke under acceleration is points to piston rings. If this is true, is there any quick fix for this issue that will allow me to limp along for another year or two until I can graduate from college? This is only my weekend car right now and doesn't get a whole ton of use, so I'd rather not drop a ton of time and money into repairing the current engine when I plan on replacing it when I graduate from college. The engine currently has 166.5k miles on it.

 

Its either the piston rings or the valve seals. It sounds like you don't have the tools or facilities to do the work at this time, so I'd recommend just keep checking the oil and adding as needed.

 

Use thicker oil. A bottle of 'Stop-Smoke' seemed to work for me. It wont stop the consumption, but it'll make it less noticeable.

Take off your valve covers and make sure the drain holes arent plugged with junk.

 

If it smokes all the time it's running it's the piston rings. If you start it up and there is a puff of smoke it will be the seals around the valve stem more than likely. Same thing goes for when it's running and you get on it.

 

Do you mean valve seals or piston rings in this case?

 

I mean the valve seals.

 

Great. I'll focus on them.

 

You could have a bad intake gasket, it could be sucking oil from the valley.

 

this happen often?

 

It's not super common, but it does show up when people swap intakes & heads.
If you car had a carb or tbi I'd say look down the bore for oil puddling on the intake floor. That's hard to do with tpi.