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My motor did it when new. I forgot the pcv and breather when breaking it in. Not only ballooned valley, also leaking gaskets. I replaced the pan and added a breather. 6 years later the same motor is still running strong.



Well - how you define "running strong" is way diff than mine. If you have enough pressure to "inflate" the VP gasket ..... your motor is a leaker- big-time. And piston-ring-seal is probably the most important factor of a good running internal combustion engine.

To the guy who had the stuck-floats and the oil was diluted with gas .... you probably hurt the rings badly. It is a well-known-fact that you can damage the rings with an excessively rich A/F mixture. What happens is that rich-mixture "washes" the oil off the rings and cyl walls. NOT good.



I think you would be surprised how a good running engine WITHOUT a breather or PCV valve can pop a valley pan gasket.
Regular blowby running at highway speeds, I've seen it.






There was nothing wrong with my motor when it ballooned the valley pan. IF you think it would pop up the dipstick think of how much surface area a dipstick has to "push" on as opposed to a valley pan. It makes perfect sense a valley pan would balloon before your dipstick "rocketed" out! Pressure is force/area so since the pressure is about constant per unit area, the total force would be orders of magnitude greater on a valley pan than a dipstick.

There is also something to be said about when an engine is FIRST cranked that it has a break-in period where it will seat the rings. Blow-by is lost horsepower but from what I have gathered, after about 30 minutes of running the engine at 3000 RPM, the problem subsided. To bad within that time, I had NO BREATHER OR PCV and ballooned the pan after about 20 minutes. After adding that, everything has been totally normal. ANY motor with out any type of venting will build up pressure and eventually balloon/blow something. BTW, nothing else was damaged on my motor. Just loosened up the oil cap for a sec to let the gas escape...

I posted exactly what happened in this case up here around a year ago and nobody had anything bad to say about it then...