oil on top of valve cover?

[thereverendbill]

I put an aluminum valve cover on my wagon months ago and I notice that there is oil pooling on the front half of the valve cover.  I have a pcv valve in the rear, chrome breather in the front and an after market oil plug (both spectre).

[mudkicker715]

Poor pcv system. Or your blowby exceeds the system. My concord has 2 pcv valves to stop it. It breathes through a poor oil cap. I probobly coulda replaced the cap,but I chose rm since I had a t and a pcv extra.

[WoodenBirdOfPrey]

If I had to guess i'd start checking at the breather first.  The way I understand the system, with a PCV valve on it and hooked up, that breather would be doing more harm than good because the PCV line is pulling the fumes out of the crankcase.  I can't think of why that would make it leak but I think there should be either the breather or the PCV on there, not both, that's how I've always seen them.

[vangremlin]

Are you getting a good fit with the oil cap?  I was having a problem with that and getting a lot of oil all over

[ammachine390]

I think there should be either the breather or the PCV on there, not both, that's how I've always seen them.

It should have both. Every car that has a PCV valve also has a breather. Usually the breather is just a tube going from the the valve cover to the air cleaner inlet. A breather filter works too though.

[GRONK]

Replace PCV valve and make sure it has a direct connection to manifold vacuum.  Add filtered breather and route it to air cleaner.  Check oil cap for fitment.

[Eagleearl]

I had that problem this summer and then found at the international meet, when I put a lot of miles on at once, that it was my oil cap not sealing. Got  new one and the problem went away. A PCV system needs an air intake somewhere.

[WoodenBirdOfPrey]

Ok, it appears I didn't have a good understanding of the system... now that I'm thinking about it I guess everything I ever had did have a vent, they were just piped into the air intake instead of having a separate filter..

[BenM]

The first time I put an aluminum cover on I had that problem too. I removed it and added a much longer baffle at each end and that solved the problem.

I don't think there is enough baffle in most of them, if you have good oiling it'll pool on top of the small baffles easily enough then get blown out.

[carguy87]

Just an easy check to do to prevent further work. Remove your oil dipstick, put a small water balloon over the tube end, then start your car.  There should be just enough pressure to make it expand a little, but if it pops before you can get back under the hood to look, then you need to check your compression to see which cylinder has the bad rings. Usually it's the center cylinders that go bad first.

[shaggimo]

Poor pcv system. Or your blowby exceeds the system. My concord has 2 pcv valves to stop it. It breathes through a poor oil cap. I probobly coulda replaced the cap,but I chose rm since I had a t and a pcv extra.

I had the same issue with the sx, I did just as mk, added a second pcv valve in place of the breather, worked like charm. I did the same to my 4.0.