As I was changing my oil this weekend, my oil cap was giving me a really hard time coming loose. Not really sure how this happened, but anyway it came loose...but with the filler neck. After swearing and looking over the piece, I noticed that it looks like a little tab broke off the filler neck. The tab appears looks like it keeps the tube in place once twisted down. There's no place else for the tab to go except for into the depths of the engine. I tried to flush it out with some more oil, but have seen no evidence of it.

How concerned should I be with this little piece of plastic? I know it's obviously not ideal, but could I get away with this? Do you think this would get caught in some filter?

It's always something...

 

So I'm assuming it just fell down into the valve cover? Not sure if it would do much damage or not, but its not a big job to take the valve cover off. You could probably find the piece that way.

 

If you fill your engine with oil from the valve cover, I would just replace the whole assembly.

 

Where else would put the oil in?

 

From what I can see here and from other postings, it looks like I can drain the oil again and take the valve cover off. The piece seems like it's probably about the size of a 1/8" cube. Does anyone think that this piece could make its way on down to the oil pan? I'm not really sure how big the oil passages are. I'm comfortable if it's down in the oil pan because I think there's decent odds it will come out with a drain. But if it's kicking around underneath the valve cover, I'm pretty concerned.

 

I'd pull the cover and check it out... it's likely still up there!

 

This is a REALLY old thread, however I had this happen to me tonight on my 2002 3.0 and just wanted to list an update since the original poster never did.

My fill tube broke the exact same way as the one shown above. After removing the tube and looking into the valve cover through the fill hole, I couldn't see the piece of plastic. Knowing that the piece of plastic was definitely in there, I pulled the valve cover off and lo and behold, there it was laying on the cylinder head. Unfortunately it fell right in front of the entrance to the oil passage, which could have been bad news if it lodged itself or broke into smaller pieces. Either way, I removed it, cleaned everything up, installed a new valve cover gasket and put everything back together, minus the cheap plastic fill tube. That piece of trash went straight in the garbage.