Oil surge and leakage issues on track - Help?

[ChasR]

I was enjoying the car on the day of the Pistonheads Sunday Service! However, the car decided that once again it would not play ball.

On hard left corners it appeared to be throwing oil out of the vent pipe of the oil separator as seen below:



I thought it was the exhaust but a friend in the Audi RS4 said it was underneath the car!

Yup, I may have been the reason for why the session ended! Bloody POS! Both of my French cars behaved better than this on track! To add insult to injury a Westfield that day running a CVH 1.6 had a stockish breather setup but the breather going from the cambelt side of the cam cover to underneath the car with no issues.

The engine bay is spotless, but the underneath of the car was covered in oil, which I promptly cleaned up. According to the dipstick the car lost 1/4 to 1/2 a litre of oil. Not good!

At the moment the vent pipe simply had a breather filter on it but clearly this will not suffice! I was debating plumbing the vent pipe back into the metering head but surely that quantity of oil loss would cause damage elsewhere!

The only thing I can think of it being is an oil surge issue!

In your experience what will stop oil surge on a Ford ZVH engine?

So far it is running the following:
1.8 ZVH
KE-Jetronic
Bailey Dump valve (the pipes were clean when I temporarily removed it to put on a blanking bung).
Oil drain above the sump IIRC
Bailey oil separator (or should I say oil dumper!)
BC5 Gearbox (as a result I think it is using the earlier sump. It is a one piece affair!).

The suspension is modded but nothing major for the car. It's on Leda coilovers, Nankang NS2R track tyres with it being fully polybushed.

I have considered fitting a catch can but losing that much oil within such a short space of time cannot be doing the engine any favours!

Any other suggestions? I have a nasty suspicion it could be the sump or the lack of a windage tray in the sump. Would having ARP bolts affect the latter?

FWIW it has never thrown oil out ever before even on the return journey. I whacked in an empty bottle onto the vent pipe only to see water in it when I got back home despite topping the oil up.

One day this heap of rubbish will behave. At least it is my heap of curse word.

[fordperv]

Silly question but have you got the Bailey separator piped correctly? On the mrs rs that I have fitted management to until I can get a separator I adapted the breather from the ke setup so it just vents to atmosphere and there isn't oil evident when pushing it hard

[ChasR]

AFAIK yes I have but there is an image attached below to show how I have done it.

I did previously have a catch tank setup but I was advised by many that this was not a great setup for engine. It looked as the pic below where the crankcase pipe was as per factory (going from the crankcase to the nearside rocker cover breather, and then a pipe from the offside breather going into a catch tank and venting to atmosphere.



The issue with this was that:

-It breathed misty oil out of the breather onto the front of the engine but worse the cambelt. The latter was the biggest reason for me ditching the setup, especially when ZVH are said to breather a little heavier (unsurprising given the extra capacity and extra blowby from the extra power of the car).
-Emptying it out was a pain. It was mostly water in there mind you. The car OTOH did not handle so great when I bought it!
-Gaskets misting up. A previous owner from when the engine was rebuilt thought a crank seal was gone. IMO the breather system was not helping matters. This has stopped surprisingly with the Bailey setup. What was an oily sump is now bone dry.

TBH my Triumph Stag went the opposite way when I went from a semi PCV system (the Strombergs) to an open breather system, so much so that it would drip after being turned off. OTOH the breather systems on Stags probably is not the best anyway!

The below is how I plumbed in the breather


And here is how it is looking. You can just about make out the photo for the crankcase breather below at the bottom left of the first photo:





There were and still are a few issues which I shall go into:

-The 'drain' pipe going into the crankcase had a slight kink in the pipe, but it seemed to be draining. Some reckon this was not helping; I have since replaced this with some 'bendy' silicone hose but I have yet to drive the car much distance since doing this (it's in the bodyshop...).
-It was breathing out of the vent pipe but with a bottle put in place it only seemed to be water vapour and nothing else! It may have got better with the new drain pipe but again I don't know...
-One well known Ford garage reckons the oil drain position is not the best place on the CVHs or ZVHs with the Bailey setup, with it being above the oil level and being potentially affected by blowby. He suggested that I either put a plate beneath the crankcase breather union inside the engine to prevent oil flicking up and affecting blowby or to plumb the drain into the sump plug, thus not having the oil affected by blowby at all. He reckoned it would help my breather issues alot! What do you peeps think?
-AFAIK my Zetec sump has no baffles. It is the one piece sump from the earlier cars. Some people on here reckon it is fine for track use, while others reckon it is useless on the track as a result. If the sump is stock it looks like below:



But a CVH one is like below:



I also understand that Zetecs run a windage tray but I am unsure as to whether I do due the engine having ARP bolts:



Any help on the matter would be appreciated. I'm beginning to wish that I stuck with my plan of going with a Stage 1 CVH but then I would not have the extra power (225BHP) and a torque curved almost as flat as a billiard table. Ho hum...

[ChasR]

Surely some of you peeps must have an idea of how to go about sorting this . As said I cannot really take this out on the track again in its current state without annoying quite a lot of people including track workers.

From the trackday I have done the following:
-replaced the kinked drain pipe. This has improved matters with the vent pipe breathing with little vapour present
-Put the vent pipe into a catch tank, well, a water bottle. While it was threw out vapour from the pipe when the drain pipe was kinked it only seems to throw out water vapour and possibly a little petrol. No mayonaise is present in the bottle, just a fairly clear fluid.


What has been suggested:
-Fit a baffled sump. This was my gut feeling before I researched stuff and initially saw the inside of a Zetec sump. However, ZetecInside's site reckons they are not needed on a Zetec even on track although there is evidence to the contrary on the web. The baffling also seems to be between £180-250 depending on where you go ; no off the shelf baffled sump is availble for a Zetec without going with a later two piece item. They however have a bolt pattern for a an MTX-75 gearbox, not a BC5 like mine. Whether this is adaptable to a BC-5 pattern for less than the cost of baffling my own sump is another question.
-Put a plate beneath the drain pipe in the engine : this sound plausible as it should stop the drain being affected by crankcase pressure but I am still unsure.
-Take the drain the sump plug and not the crankcase breather and many of these run. This is the cheapest fix and it does make sense. But if the oil surged hard enough to come out of the vent pipe of the separator, a pipe which runs almost to the top of the separator....
-Reroute the pipework to the separator; some have said that the pipe going from the cambelt side of the cam cover to the separator can fill out with oil and cause what happened to me. However, that does not quite fly with me as the car lost over 1/3 of a litre in less than 10 minutes, quite a bit more than a dip in the pipe can do unless I am missing something.

[fordperv]

I will be honest on this i can't give a definite answer, it seems as if you'll have to try a bit of trial and error with different things, another daft question, have you done a compression check? Only asking because if there is excessive blow by the crank case pressures will be much higher, in theory could cause the same thing

[mk2cossie]

As fordperv said, compression check first or even a leak down test to see what health the engine itself is in.

Then I would see if there is a windage tray or baffle plate on the bottle of the bearing caps

[ChasR]

I shall do a compression test seeing as I have a compression gauge but I reckon it is OK seeing as it does not smoke from the exhaust or use oil generally. Out of the Turbo cars it has smoked the least, even on hard acceleration with it also starting on the button. However assumptions can be dangerous!

The windage tray is something I am considering being missing . I may see if I can get an endoscope into the sump via the sump plug aperture to see what is what .

[quadra]

I think a gated sump would be a good idea, especially if you are going to track the car a lot. It would certainly help retain most of the oil where it was needed and would probably stop blow back into the oil separator.
Just think how much oil is needed to fill the return to sump pipe and the oil separator before it starts coming out of the vent pipe (it must be about half a litre), you are not leaving yourself much margin for losses.