The 1.6 tdci focus engines seem to draw a lot of oil from the rocker cover breather into the air intake , I've seen a topic on here about fitting an oil catch tank but I was thinking , can I just run a long peice of pipe from the rocker down & out under the engine bay somewhere then block off the hole on the inlet pipe ?

 

image below not mine but just to confirm what pipe I'm talking about. 

nope, well not if you want to remain road legal.

 

its apart of the emissions system, by running a pipe under the car you effectively adding a second exhaust.  If you get it wrong you might end up pumping gasses in to the cabin and you will be dumping a surprising amount of oil on the road.  My can collects about 90-100ml every 6k.

there are catch cans that have a small vent attached to them, these are also no good, to keep it legit you need to keep it in a closed loop system, ie, no venting.

Glad to see that I am not the only one who has snapped off the lugs holding this pipe on, and had resorted to cable ties!

 

I have a lot of oil in this area as well, some finds its way to the air box (not sure how as its fighting against the air flow), and some into the turbo intake but I'm told its not necessarily a bad thing as long as its not too much.

take a look inside the inlet manifold and you will see how bad it is, especially if you haven't blocked up the EGR valve, the IC also gets covered and remember that the 100ml my can normally collects would have had to go somewhere.  Collecting in the IC, binding with soot in the EGR, working its way through the inlet manifold in to the engine, all that crud either getting burnt finding its way back in to the sump or just building up is one of the reasons for turbos getting starved of oil.  its like a sticky black paste, cleaning out the manifold is on the list of jobs to do as my endoscope showed some horrible build up further inside.

 

Might just block it off then ha ha 

 

 

would it it really loose that much oil if I had just a pipe attached to it without having it connected to the inlet sucking it through  ?

 

i don't notice it on my landrover or mini , but then I don't use either of those very much 

 

that's a fair point, I don't know, but the same could be said for the exhaust gasses as well tho, if there isn't any suction would it vent the crank case fully?

Ah yeah, there is that 

Changed the fluids and cleaned the air filter yesterday , noticed the whole intake pipe was covered in oil from the breather,  as far as the air filter. 

the clean side was black & oily ! The air flow sensor was covered also, 

after cleaning this out I ran the car with out the breather fitted , just to see if the suction from the intake was needed to draw the breather fumes from the rocker.

with the pipe off the breather seemed to release the gasses fine on its own , almost like a second exhaust.  

 

There must be a mod for this stupid breather pipe , or at least some Must have tried lol ?.

you can just vent it, its not completely safe, wise or friendly but I believe that is what is done on cars used for racing.  Personally I didn't want to tempt fate with the law so the catch can was the way forward. completely closed loop and now as dry as a bone. @FOCA was the chap that helped me out and I think he either does or did vent his car, but its been a long time since ive seen him on the boards.

 

 

On 2/24/2016 at 8:46 AM, S40Un said:

Changed the fluids and cleaned the air filter yesterday , noticed the whole intake pipe was covered in oil from the breather,  as far as the air filter. 

the clean side was black & oily ! The air flow sensor was covered also, 

after cleaning this out I ran the car with out the breather fitted , just to see if the suction from the intake was needed to draw the breather fumes from the rocker.

with the pipe off the breather seemed to release the gasses fine on its own , almost like a second exhaust.  

 

There must be a mod for this stupid breather pipe , or at least some Must have tried lol ?.

Trying to find a solution for my focus mk2 1.6 SW as well, can i run a pipe down through the engine bay instead of having the breather injecting those gasses back into the engine? 

Just out of curiosity have you heard of diesel engine runaway?

None of the examples above are anywhere near causing this mode of failure in a diesel engine, but it came to mind when reading this topic.

Have a read here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_engine_runaway

Basically when anything that will burn gets in along with the air going into the cylinder it adds to the fuel in the cylinder and results in the engine producing more power than expected.

Crankcase blow by is an ideal extra fuel.

I was told that army tanks have an emergency connection to the sump so that when it runs out of diesel it can draw sump oil as fuel to continue running. Obviously it's not going far but in  action it might just make the difference in getting to safety.

ScaniaPBman.