Indiana Posted January 4, 2010 Report Share Posted January 4, 2010 You might post some pictures of the separator and how its hooked up. The PCV valve you are using, have you recently checked it to see that's its not stuck or has somehow broken internally? The front oil seal RARELY fails. The thrust plate is brass or bronze and when it wears out the shaft gets a bit of forward/rearward movement but lots of up and down movement. The up/down and it will rub wheel to housing and squeal but that's not meaning it leaks oil. Your valve cover, is it cut up to use with ARP studs? If you cut away too much of the rear baffle and not just that little bit necessary and WILL let LOTS more oil mist flow to the separator. The place you have to cut opens up the baffles to the rear port, sort of defeats its purpose and I know many just love ARP bolts but it screws up the rear baffle and is another reason you need to make sure your hoses are adequate internal diameter to keep the flow low and a 2nd connection from the crankcase to the separator, such as the turbo drain port, is a good idea and move the turbo drain to the oil pan. You can get what is called a bulkhead fitting that is AN stuff threaded on each end with a washer and nut so in your pan all you do is cut a hole and get some fittings and hose to make your turbo drain. No welding required. The front connection to the separator lets the flow exit two paths so the oil mist carried with it is greatly reduced making less work for the separator especially if you have an enlarged filter can. High sustained revs fill that head up with oil and if the only pressure exit is a cut open baffle guess what happens. As soon as the passage is blocked the pressure surges and blows not just mist but all the oil that is in the clog and this is exactly why dipsticks popout from the liquid oil pushing them out NOT just pressure. The pressure would just escape through the separator but after the liquid blocks the path of the separator than oil is thrown up the dipstick tube like a volcano and out comes the dipstick and all the oil that is pushing it out. If oil is coming from the BOV then there is suspended oil in that air charge and if its leaking so badly from the turbo that it owuld leak and FLOW out and be dripping from the housing and all your hose couplings are wet with oil but if its just suspended oil carried in the air charge most of it is being burned up and you said the exhaust is smokey. If you had a spoon full of oil and the intercooler system was fulled with oil you'd have one nice pull, suck in oil and burn that and have a great big hole burned in a piston or two. I don't think your turbos were bad but I may be wrong. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
smallblock12 Posted January 4, 2010 Author Report Share Posted January 4, 2010 well this is why i want to pul my head and check everything out. i dont want to take a chance of destroying my motor. and yes i did cut some of the valve cover but this oil problem never occured untill right before christmas then i stopped driving it. i am goin to fully clean the oil seperator and i have it hooked up correct i will try o get some pics today. but why do i really need to reroute my oild drain back from the timing cover to the oil pan? i mean it came that way from the factory and my motor only has like 6500 miles on it. so its not like it clogged or anything. and part of the reason i got a new turbo is to go back to an internal wastegate and start over and try to eliminate my boost leaks too. but the only thing i changed befpre this problem happened was switching to full synthetic from conventional oil. other then that its all the same. i just figured with what has happened i might as well pull my head and put a new gasket and valve seals in it and double check everything because i was about to start going mpi as soon as this happened Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Indiana Posted January 5, 2010 Report Share Posted January 5, 2010 The stock separator was barely adequate for stock levels, little turbo and little boost. The baffles have been opened and you have a bigger turbo and want more boost. The spot they did pick for the separator off the rear of the valve cover was a bad idea but its all they had to easily use since it was the n/a motors vent anyway. That turbo drain dumps oil into the side of the timing cover. Think about that. What is in there? The silent shafts chain is likely gone but the timing chain isn't and the right side of the chain is going which direction? UP. That oil needs to get back in to the pan to be sucked up asap. Pouring it in to the side of the timing chain isn't helping. The oil POURING over the front of the head gets mixed with that. The early motors had an oil slinger off the cam gear, we never got that I'd guess mostly since the PCV valve moved from that front half moon plug, yes that's another purpose for it not just to get to the cam gear bolt, so maybe they didn't think it needed to be there. The motor at high rpms sucks oil up quick as you can put it in the pan, you go around a hard corner, a long one, spin around in circles, all those things keep oil away from the pick up tube. The turbo must have oil and its the first to get it and if the rest of the motor just gets what's left then you make a hard turn if there isn't enough then tough crap. That turbo drain should have been in the pan in the first place like they have since put all the other turbo drains but the lazy arses didn't care the motor was dead over here. That drain port is an easy 2nd connection for a modified separator. You build the motor and change the intake and everything else I don't think a tube stuck in an oil pan is that hard now is it? The worse part is this oil separator was ignored, confused or throw away for so many years and the results if you kept track of it I'd bet were worse after they were removed so someone could sell check valves and not mention to just clean out a good pcv valve. They did this little test on a z06 so you could see, they had a clear ring and mounted it to the dash, had some liquid in it and went and drove the car. The purpose was so you could see the liquid move around, like oil in the pan to help give reason for that cars dry sump type pump. They didn't even mention the pump sucking air, the crankshaft throwing oil around etc. If you drive in a nice straight line and won't be driving in hard corners and at high rpms and won't have high boost and all that then what was stock is fine. Its just a vent for the crankcase after all but it can't get stopped up. The oil getting back to the pan is important. Ask Shelby how many cars he's known of that sat on a bank of some dirt oval track waiting for a race to start and the motors started knocking or just locked up. I suppose its a different point of view not everyone is thinking about what is giong on inside that motor when its gets beat on and how you can improve it. Some more baffles in the oil pan will help so will those crankscrapers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maxboost87 Posted January 5, 2010 Report Share Posted January 5, 2010 (edited) I have a story that goes along with this Indiana that happend to me..one night i felt like throwing her around so i dumped the clutch and cut the wheel left spun around one time and it started rolling backwards while spinning then i could tell something happened i let it go back down to idle before i took off again and oil pressure had dropped like 10 psi at idle and i heard a slight knocking pulled over checkdd the oil, full to the top limped it home with the knock taking it real easy the 5 miles. dumped the oil out and its was Maybe 1/2 quart light so when i got it apart i read the rod bearing(s) all 4, and it showed that they has lost oil while i was in a high rpm maybe only for a split second but thats all it takes at 6k and alot of boost to destroy a clevite, If the pan had a better shielding system this would not have happened, i got lucky with just a new set of bearings and 3 hours of work, but it is somthing you must think about Edited January 5, 2010 by maxboost87 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
smallblock12 Posted January 6, 2010 Author Report Share Posted January 6, 2010 yeah i understand what you are say indiana. so would i be better off with an aftermarket catch can? and when i reroute my oil return line fo i just plug the timing cover up? and i plan on bafffling my pan already have an extra pan just havent gotten around to it. but i cleaned out all the ic piping and emptied the intercooler and washed it with mineral spirits and no oil yet but i only drove it once easy for like 30 minutes. i cleaned the oil seperator to. wasnt really that dirty but had chunks of stuff in it so i guess it was just a little to clogged and was putting to much oil in the turbo inlet? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SteveDSM Posted February 27, 2010 Report Share Posted February 27, 2010 i know this is kind of an old thread to just now be piping in on, but did you figure this problem out yet? if not the one other thing i know of (happened to me almost exactly the same but with my 90 Eclipse GSX) but since both my GSX (being a 90) and all SQ cars have an external oil cooler, check that or at least take the lines and cooler off and soak/clean the lines/cooler out for an hour or 2 at least and that may solve it... pretty simple thing to try so thought you might like to know before you go too crazy... even if you have figured it out if anyone else has a problem like this then DO NOT overlook the oil cooler... i talked to alot of long time DSM/SQ guys and none of them thought of the oil cooler being plugged. i racked my head for about a month trying to figure it out (wasnt my DD at that point) either way i hope you figure/figured this out! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stealth Posted March 22, 2010 Report Share Posted March 22, 2010 Hate when ask for help, people give suggestions and then no update as to what it actually was. So what was it, turbo...rings...oil seperator...oil cooler???? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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