The tubing is .750" OD stainless tube, and it is stepped up to 1" OD on the ends (to fit the 1" ports on the Provent 200 and the stainless tube coming from the intake pipe). The basic goal was to eliminate using the factory setup where the PCV valve utilizes a channel in the valvecover to route gasses to the intake when under boost. I have read that these channels fail (they let engine oil into them from under the valvecover), and have discovered that mine too was letting oil in. I was going through roughly a quart of oil every 1400 miles or so, and my car would belch out huge clouds of oil burned smoke when I took 2nd and 3rd to redline while getting on the freeway every now and then. I have also pulled my intake boots off the intercooler piping before and had 3/4 cup of engine oil pour out. Yuck. We are all aware of the factory pcv problems -- this is my solution.
I went with the provent because it stands out to me as a well engineered item. I also like it because it has a REAL FILTER inside. I see so many catch cans that are supposed to rely on "race proven swirl-pot technology". Have you seen the size of the water/oil droplets that come out of the valve cover? It is almost steam. The vapor isn't huge droplets of oil that are immediately going to separate out of the air as soon as they hit a given surface. And (if your engine is in acceptable shape) the amount of blowby gasses at any given time aren't going to be traveling at a high enough velocity through a 3/4" or 1" tube in order to centrifugally coalesce on the walls of a "swirl pot". The stuff that gathers in these things is mostly a function of condenstation, because the catch can generally stays at a lower temerature than the engine vapors. And the filter inside seems like it will do a better job of gathering the oil/water droplets than a swirl design. All of this is obviously my opinion on the matter...but if you know something that I said has been tested to be wrong, I am all ears!
So far I have about 1200 miles on the setup, and I have completely eliminated the belching oil smoke from oil in my intake problem...at least so far. Oil consumption seems to have fallen to more normal levels as well -- I have burned about 1/5 of a quart over the 1200 miles. I have the drain of the catch can blocked off right now, so that I can observe what is being caught and how much of it. It is mostly water, with a faint oil film inside of the can. I think the factory oil separators do a decent job of pulling oil vapor out of the air, this is sort of a last defense before it goes back into the intake. I may just install a solenoid on the drain of this can and let it empty the [mostly water] mixture out of the bottom (routed to somewhere near the ground) when the car is shut off.
Anyways, here are some photos of the install, hopefully they will give someone else an idea for their own setup. The goal was to have the install look somewhat factory. I bought an Integrated engineering PCV block off plate and reverse engineered it so that I could make out out of stainless steel. I wanted it out of stainless so that I could weld my outlet tube onto it, as I found that threaded fittings were going to be too clumsy to fit them into the space that I wanted. I still need to put tabs on the tubes to coneect them to the engine -- but for now it is a pretty solid setup. The bent tubes are a side-effect of being in the hydraulics tubing/piping business
Let me know what you think!
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Originally Posted by mmitocky
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