oil from breather

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MoparOrNokar

HammerTime
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Ok i will try and make this short as possible. Fresh 360. About 400 miles on it. When breaking in the cam i had a small oil leak at the back of the intake. No oil spray from anywhere else. Broke the cam in at 2k and had several burps up to 3500ish. After breakin i removed the intake and fixed the leak. After fixing the leak the breather started pushin oil. I put the old breather back on that has the tube to the air cleaner hat. Still noticing oil buildup on intake and underside of air cleaner hat. Stock valve covers with baffles.

When building the engine we primed it as our last step and oil pressure read 70#. With the covers off the rockers literally shot oil 2 feet out of the engine. Now with the engine installed its running about 65# oil pressure. Is it over oiling the top end? Is this too much oil pressure? I checked for vaccum leaks and cant find any. Could it be leaking to the valley and pressurizing?

Im new to all of this so be easy on me guys
 
Do a compression check, your new rings may not have seated yet.

What break in oil did you use?
 
What type of piston rings are being used? Do you have any info on how bores' hone finish? New pistons and bored block? How long did you run the break-in oil? If you changed to the synthetic after the first 20-30 minutes of break-in of the cam, then it is very possible the rings have not seated.

With your 1st paragraph, it sounds like there is indeed some blow by in the crankcase. But, with the PCV, was it free and clear, and where does it hook up? Is there clear space where it plugs into the valve cover?

Oil pressure should be OK. No way to say on the rockers without further info. What rocker system? Did oil shoot out of both sides? Did the cam have grooved journals on 2 and 4, or were grooved cam bearings used on 2 and 4?
 
Bored and hone. Not sure on hone finish. Cp116 pistons. I believe they were sealed power rings?
Ran the break in for about 30 min. Today its getting conventional oil.

Pcv is hooked to back of holley carb to manifold vac. Not sure what u mean by the clear space in valve cover.

Rockers are comp pro magnums. Cam is a xe274. I honestly cant remember if the bearings or journals were grooved.
 
Ah.... I would have run break-in/conventional oil for a few hundred mile to a thousand mile. Synthetic gets in the way of ring break-in. (But does wonders to prevent ring and bore wear when it is in there.)

Once you put some non-synthetic back in, run it for hundreds of miles. Vary the loads (throttle openings in the flat lands) and RPM's a lot. I hope things have not glazed up and you can get this done.

The comment about the space under PVC is just to be sure the PCV inlet is not blocked. Probably not....But is there a baffle under the PCV?

6" of vacuum at 900 RPM? That seems way too low for that cam. If you take to PCV valve out of the cover with the hose still hooked to the intake, does the idle speed change? Where are you measuring this? Just wondering if the crankcase pressure is making this abnormal...

For the Magnum rockers, I don't know the intimate details of the flow restrictions in the Magnum system so I can't help on that. But it would not make excess crankcase pressure per se.
 
Yah there is a baffle and seams to be plenty of clearance under the pcv
Im measuring the vaccum at the full manifold port of the carb. I have not tried to pull the pcv while its running. When i get a min i will try this.
The rockers arent from a magnum. They are just called pro mag. Same as stock la rockers. I have them on eddy heads
 
is the valve cover on the other side of pcv valve vented to pull clean air through?
 
Ah, duh, ok on the rockers. Are these the Comp ones? I'm curious now....

Well when the oil squirted out, did it do it one one side only? Or both? If one side, then perhaps the oiling hole in the cam journal to that side just happened to be lined up and put full juice to that side. If so, then full oiling pressure to either rocker set drops to about 5% of the time when it is running so the flow gets a lot less.

Are there shims and clearance settings between the rocker pairs on this setup? If so, what side clearance was put in? I found on the PRW aluminum rockers that the underside mounting hole in the shaft (where it goes against the rocker stand that carries the oil up through the head) was smaller than stock and was the main controlling oil restriction. I dunno what your system has for oil flow control but it could be something as 'unobvious' as that.

When we had the oil holes in the cam journal lined up to supply one head or the other constant oil under static conditions, and primed the engine, the oil did not squirt out 2'; it just oozed/flowed out evenly on one side or the other. So that system has some oil flow control. (They're on Edelbrock heads also...)

But this does not strike me as the main issue for you.
 
Can you post a pic of the rockers?

If there is a hole in the top of the rocker, I plug it with a piece of lead shot, depending on the size of the hole. The last thing you need is oil blowing out of the top of the rocker.


EDIT: If you are using the 1622 comp rocker arms there IS a hole in the top of the rocker. They think it lubes the roller but it don't. Plug them. They are just spraying oil all over for nothing. You can PROVE this out, because the oil goes out the top of the top of the rocker. It hits the valve cover and then just gets sloshed around. The oil flying off the valve springs will put more than enough oil mist around to oil th rollers.
 
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Interesting on the excess oiling, YR.

OBTW, OP, it would worth while to take compression readings at this point on each cylinder and see if any one cylinder is having an issue. I'd do that, and take and record compression readings every hundred miles or so for a few hundred.
 
Yes my rockers have the hole in the top. Thats where it speewed from when primed. I didnt understand it. Just oiled the valve cover lol. Im wondering if this is where the oil in the breather is coming from. Even though the baffle is there. It was alot of oil.

What pcv do u guys use?
 
So you pulled the PCV from the valve cover and left it hooked to the hose to under the carb? If that is what you did, I would not expect any change. Put you finger over the end of the PCV to close it off and see if that changes anything and see if there is some suction into the PCV.
 

OK, that means the PCV is open and its hose and fitting under the carb are clear, and it is basically doing what it should. If you have a breather on the other valve cover that let's air into the other head, then the PCV system is complete and should keep some slight negative pressure in the crankcase most of the time. Unless there is more blowby past the rings than the PCV can suck up.

Hook back up the PCV, pull off the breather on the other side, idle the engine and see if some suction is at the breather hole.... or if there is air blowing out of the breather hole. It may or may not be pushing air out at idle Then rev it some to like maybe 3k RPM, and see if air comes out of the breather hole.

Have you seen more oil out of the breather after romping on the engine some? Is there a baffle under the breather?
 
There is a baffle on both valve covers. Seems like its only pushing oil at higher rpm. Weird that it started after the intake was re glued. Never did it during break in.

So whats the worst im looking at here. New rings and hone or hone and bore
 
IMHO, ring and hone at worst. But if this only happens at higher RPM's then that is all normal to some degree: the vacuum in the intake drops to near zero at WOT, and so the PCV does pretty much nothing to evacuate the crankcase so it is not unusual for some degree of oil vapors to blow out of the breather at WOT; it is just a matter of how much. Since we can't be there, it is hard for us to say if what you have is normal or not.

I would not panic yet and run the non-synthetic for 500-1000 miles at least, or even more, change it after 500 miles, and run the engine at a lot of different RPM's and loads. Don't just rip on it all the time, cruise in it, drive slow, drive fast, etc. See how it is acting after that. The moly coating is gone now so that aid to ring seating is not available, BUT, back before Moly-faced rings existed, it was 100% normal to take a while to seat rings. The owner's manuals warned drivers to not idle to car too long or drive at a constant speed for a long time when new; this was the same advice and was for the purpose of making the rings seat, so you are hopefully just back to doing it the old-fashioned way.
 
nm9stheham said:
IMHO, ring and hone at worst. But if this only happens at higher RPM's then that is all normal to some degree: the vacuum in the intake drops to near zero at WOT, and so the PCV does pretty much nothing to evacuate the crankcase so it is not unusual for some degree of oil vapors to blow out of the breather at WOT; it is just a matter of how much. Since we can't be there, it is hard for us to say if what you have is normal or not.

I would not panic yet and run the non-synthetic for 500-1000 miles at least, or even more, change it after 500 miles, and run the engine at a lot of different RPM's and loads. Don't just rip on it all the time, cruise in it, drive slow, drive fast, etc. See how it is acting after that. The moly coating is gone now so that aid to ring seating is not available, BUT, back before Moly-faced rings existed, it was 100% normal to take a while to seat rings. The owner's manuals warned drivers to not idle to car too long or drive at a constant speed for a long time when new; this was the same advice and was for the purpose of making the rings seat, so you are hopefully just back to doing it the old-fashioned way.
Click to expand...


If you think running a different oil for "X" amount of miles will fix a bad hone job, you would be wrong. I can't tell you how many blocks I have honed, and I never had one, not ONE that didn't have the rings seated in no more the 5 minutes of run time. All that break in and this many miles is 100% bull crap.

If you have blow by, you have a ring issue. Nothing will fix that but honing the bores correctly. And not slobbering oil all over the rings when you assemble it.
 
nm9stheham said:
IMHO, ring and hone at worst. But if this only happens at higher RPM's then that is all normal to some degree: the vacuum in the intake drops to near zero at WOT, and so the PCV does pretty much nothing to evacuate the crankcase so it is not unusual for some degree of oil vapors to blow out of the breather at WOT; it is just a matter of how much. Since we can't be there, it is hard for us to say if what you have is normal or not.

I would not panic yet and run the non-synthetic for 500-1000 miles at least, or even more, change it after 500 miles, and run the engine at a lot of different RPM's and loads. Don't just rip on it all the time, cruise in it, drive slow, drive fast, etc. See how it is acting after that. The moly coating is gone now so that aid to ring seating is not available, BUT, back before Moly-faced rings existed, it was 100% normal to take a while to seat rings. The owner's manuals warned drivers to not idle to car too long or drive at a constant speed for a long time when new; this was the same advice and was for the purpose of making the rings seat, so you are hopefully just back to doing it the old-fashioned way.
Click to expand...
Thanks alot guy for all your help. Its definately not alot of oil. Doesnt smoke the least little bit with the breather to air cleaner. Now if i could just get the damn thing tuned lol. Thanks again man. You sound very knowledgeable
 
I ran a compression test today. Motor was cold but all cylinders were 140 to 150 psi dry. Went back thru and did a wet test and had relatively zero change. 1 or 2 psi. Any thoughts on this situation now?
 
Here is some more machining info if it helps

20160609_212614.jpg
 
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