the saga continues:

i ran the car with the breathers on and the gauge connected to the dipstick tube, and got no reading at all. now, the gauge may not be sensitive enough for this application, as some have suggested, but at least it's safe to say it wasn't excessive.

took the car for a drive, came back, oil all over the steering box, frame rail below the battery tray! and... no dipstick. no, the dipstick isn't on the side of the road, it's on the bench in plain sight, where i left it after not putting it back in.

so, clean it up, out for another run, (which included WOT through 1st into 3rd), and there is oil running down the valve cover from the breathers. more on the drivers side, a little on the passenger side.

now these are K/N breathers that are more like filters, with rubber grommets that slide over the outside of the stove pipe sticking up from the valve cover. so any oil blown up inside these has no place to go except out through the filter paper.

so right now it seems i have 2 issues:

1) too much blow by
2) oil being either sucked into the engine (via the pcv), or blown out the breathers, at least partly, or mostly, because of the blowby.

1 i'm not going to do anything about right now. at least in the near future, i'm not going to tear the motor apart.

but somehow i have to figure out how to keep the oil in the engine, and at least a good portion of my oil consumption should go away.

my valve covers have baffles, (and it baffles me how that much oil gets past the baffles ). i will try my old breather on the driver side this week, and see if it leaks as much. i'm kind of thinking it won't, as it butts up against the top of the stove pipe, and so i would think a good deal of oil can simply run back down inside.

it never leaked before, but i've run it with the pcv, where air was being sucked through that breather, and up through the pcv, along with oil.

anyway, anyone have any thoughts about how to simply set this up so it can vent the crankcase, but not spew oil?

or any other thoughts?