Valve cover breather leaker tinker

Unless you verified that you have good draw on the vacuum line that the PCV feeds, you may stil have an issue with excessive crankcase pressure.

The air flow through the crankcase should be INTO the breather on the valve cover.

You block that off and you are going to be forcing venting OUT somewhere. . . like through crank,rear main, and cam seals.

To test a PCV valve, with a running engine at idle, you pull the valve while it is attached to the hose, and the idle quality should remain consistant.

You then pull the valve from the hose, and the engine should die immediately, due to the introduction of a big fat vacuum leak.

Maybe you need to check the vacuum inlet port for carbon and blockage.

Thanks for the response, I will give this a try and report back w results. Id hate to have to take the engine back out, replacing gaskets in the process and delay driving her....she's my greatest money pit to date, but I do love her.

Ill be sure to post results w/in a few days gents

I have verified what was suggested above and the PCV is working fine, the motor dies upon vacuum leak. I am going to do a compression test. What will the results prove?

I don't know how many miles are on the engine since it was put together.

I don't know what was done with regards to prep work.

I don't know much.

But generically, I would offer the following:

First, I would run the vehicle at 65 mph on a freeway somewhere for about an hour to allow deposits, if any, to get put on the plug. I would make sure that the plugs for this test had clean insulators and all looked the same prior to testing, using this method.

Pull each plug and number it from the hole it comes out of. That way they can provide evidence that will be lost otherwise.

Once the road run is complete, I suspect that one of your plugs is going to look darker than the others. That cylinder *may* be the one that has a misaligned ring gap or some other problem. . .

It could be that when the rings were installed, one of the rings got installed upside down, or *maybe* number 2 gap got concentric with the top oil control rail. A compression test will not pick this up. Maybe a ring got fractured on reassembly, and a noticeably different colored plug insulator will show this.

I think what you are seeing with excessive blowby is misaligned gaps, or a broken ring maybe, which can happen even under the best of rebuilds.

There is an outside possibility that the rings just have not seated yet.

I can't say I have many miles put on since the motor has been reassembled. I am going to remove each plug, clean them, calibrate them (what would you recommend for this app?) And run them for an hour.

thanks so much for your input.

.28-.33 inch

.75-.85 mm

I've searched but cannot find a good torque spec for the spark plugs, suggestions?

Just do a compression test. Dry then wet.

Looks like we gettin bout 125psi out of cyl#1,3. Cyl#2,4 bout 122psi. Seems good to me imo. I'm runnin out of ideas time, and patience...I pulled the s.plugs out an each looked quite clean w the anode white as can be....what can be causing this blow-by? My oil catch can gets 1/3d full after bout 30 miles. I don't feel right about driving her in this condition....just feel like this will only get worse

You must run the draw for the vacuum tube off the cover of the Metco only. Connect draw draw fresh air and PCV Metco side completely. Now, fresh air is drawn through the Metco, through the engine to the inside of the PVC pipe at the front entrance and valvecover to be burned. If eliminating your problems.