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You did the right thing, well done on you. Hope it's a cheap fix and offer him first refusal once it's sorted.

Hi Guys, if the weather permits and my battery arrives will join you at Leek as above in my yellow westie. Will know more tomorrow if the battery has been delivered. This will be the first start up and trip this year for my car. cheers Jon

I'll try and dig out some photos for you tomorrow. Yes this was my old car and it was me that came up with the design

Tom's old car - T3OMF Tom fitted the indicators and used some Carbon offcut we had to mount them , and yes the car is for sale and still looks mint too .

I'm booked in. Looking forward to this and the sprint on the Saturday. I would be grateful to get some tuition if possible John. I have not been to Blyton Park before.

it was marcuses car the yellow westfield with the black nose cone as you say yhey looked really smart

I was thinking of trading in the wife for one of those!

Pinto engines coming from a car with auto transmission have a different valve from those from manuals I seem to recall. Mine has an oil trap only in the crankcase breather, and no spring loaded valve as that impedes the gasses flowing out to the catch tank. When I bought my Westfield it had a breather from the crankcase and one from the cam cover which were combined before going to the catch tank. It would dump far too much oil into the catch tank so I looked into the problem. I talked to Vulcan Engineering about the need for a cam cover vent and the chap said there is no real need for one, and as the Burton article says, sprayed oil from the camshaft can find its way out via the breather. Logically analysing the situation suggests a breather in the cam cover is not only not needed, but can be detrimental for both the above reason and another which I will come to. As others have said, an engine must breathe out any piston blow by that builds in the bottom half of the engine. There is no source of pressure in the cam cover so why vent it? Any puffing of crankcase gasses found when the oil filler cap is off have come up the oil return channels between the cam chamber and the crankcase and have not originated in the cam chamber. It might even be that a generous flow of these blow by gasses up the oil return channels could impede the oil's journey down to the sump. For that reason I removed the vent and sealed the vent holes in the oil filler cap. Once this is done, of course, the only path to the outside for crankcase pressure is through the crankcase vent and this MUST be of sufficient capacity to allow free passage of gasses and not offer any resistance or excess crankcase pressure will result. Having bunged up all exit points in the top half, I no longer need to drain the catch tank after a few hundred miles as I used to have to. I know this is going against the conventional wisdom but the reason oil filler caps on 'normal' cars have vents in them is to allow air to be drawn in, not to allow gasses out. The positive ventilation system applies a low level vacuum to the crankcase via a connection to the inlet manifold, and the gasses are sucked into the engine and burned. Our modified engines do not do this. Here's the OEM layout from a Granada with a Pinto engine: The stubby barrel like item is the valve - get rid of that in favour of an oil trap froma manual car. I opened mine up and removed the spring loaded plunger and then reassembled it as a take-off elbow/oil trap only.

That'll bring tears to your eye's

I have that in order James, Shocking Pink ( that's the bits on show - not the colour)

Yoda impressions, Oh Gods, it's worse than we thought, has someone been feeding him special jelly too? Don't worry, if you come home from your hols with a funny haircut and a fondness for platform shoes, we'll order some more dried frog pills for you!

Success! I'm on for Abingdon and booked in! 1. Gary Lucas (KugaWestie) MX5 Westfield NOW BOOKED 2. Chris Lowe (cl290005) ST170 Westfield NOW BOOKED 3. Luke Reeves (reeves_luke89) V8 Westfield 4. Dom Osman (Dommo) MX5 Westfield 5. Stuart Orr (the stoat) XE Westfield 6. Richard Brookes (CrisisWolf) Zetec Westfield 7. Mike Hardwick (Mooch) MX5 Westfield NOW BOOKED

Hi Ian, I don't have direct experience of the Pinto but I have with the Xflow. The Burton Power link from LP is a good starting point for background information. A search online for "pinto breather pcv" and/or "xflow breather pcv" also returns some excellent forum posts on the subject. I removed my PCV valve and replaced with the Burtons elbow. On a Xflow, its also necessary to get a fuel pump blanking plate with an L shaped bracket on the back to stop the crank throwing oil directly up into the elbow. Might not apply on a Pinto but worth checking. At this point there are essentially two options for taking this to an oil catch tank: Plumb the elbow to the catch tank and plumb the oil filler cap take off to the catch tank separately. Plumb the elbow to the rocker cover and the have a single feed from the oil filler cap to the catch tank. Whichever option you take, put a breather on top of the catch tank to allow ventilation to the air. On my Xflow, I went for option 2 because my catch tank only had two unions and I wanted to use one of them to connect the breather. However, note that it hasn't cured my heavy breathing problem and the oil filler cap still lifts (but the bonnet stops it coming all the way out). It also brought about new problems, e.g. the dipstick started lifting out too. I am hoping to fix these problems with a larger diameter union on the rocker cover and baffling of the rocker cover as per the Burton Power guide. HTH, Bill

Now theres a good day out visit old pultney distillery in wick a good dram and excellent twisty roads most of you would call b roads but thats our main roads. Of course the dram is for the passenger And yes its the one in craigellachie

I'm There all weekend John but hope to do trackday and sprints so can only volunteer for evening duties. Paddock police sounds good if i can put blue fashing lights on the car and shout neee norrr. :-)

Don't go breakin my kart I couldnt if I tried...