N/a

 

I'm new to the Mini, but not to tuning. I found out about the PCV issue a few weeks after I picked up my 2008 MCS, and deleted the PCV right away. My current setup uses a breather filter mounted on the firewall, but I'm going to a catch can setup soon. Once I get it dialed in, I'm installing the same thing on my wife's 2013 MCS.
If you want to avoid blowing oil back into your intake and gunking everything up, there should be no connection between your crankcase breathers and your intake anywhere.

 

Let me add that when I took the breather hose off my intake tube, I could see evidence of oil being drawn into it from the breather. This leads me to believe that a PCV bypass is a critical mod for these cars. Just make sure you don't run your breather hose to your catch can and back to the intake tube like some here have done, because that still allows oil vapors to be drawn into the intake. Run a vented catch can setup for best results, with the vent positioned as far as possible from the cabin (so you don't have to smell the crankcase vapors).

 

When I plugged my intake manifold side PCV valve with normaquick plugs, oil consumption got very severe, and for good reason. The PCV function is disabled!!!! Do some searching on this and you'll find out this is a bad idea.

Bite the bullet and just clean the intake tract guys.

 

That's what my plan is. We'll just be sucking it up and doing the walnut shell blasting every 25k miles or so. If we have the car another 25k miles

 

What do you mean by "very severe"? What did you do on the breather side? I have run a vented catch can on my other car for quite a few years now without issues, with no change in the oil consumption.

If there's enough oil being sucked into the intake to cause the combustion chambers to be gunked up in such a short time, then you think the intercooler, turbo, and charge pipes would be totally slimed up as well. Also, burning oil causes knock, and knock retard costs power. And what about the converters? How long will they last if we're blowing oil through them?
If my current PCV delete setup causes issues, I will keep tweaking it until I find one that doesn't. I drive enough that I will know very soon what works and what doesn't. Paying a grand every 25k to get the combustion chambers cleaned is out of the question.

 

You're cleaning the top side of the valves, not the combustion chamber, peckerhead....

Though, that simply makes the cost sound even worse. And it can be done for not too much money at home. I mean...if you're not the "Yippee, paid the dealer to change my oil today!" type and know your way around a wrench.

 

My mistake. But to me, getting it cleaned periodically is just taking care of the symptom, not the problem. It's not good to be blowing that much oil through the intake

I read that a few people had issues with their turbo leaking when they did the PCV delete. One more thing to watch for, I guess. I have a friend who built turbos for a local tuner for years. I'll run mine by him if an issue arises, and have him address it.

 

As far as helping to slow down the build up and help stop oil from getting blown back into the intake of your engine: Draft tubes. Super old tech, and not legal exactly(PCV systems were designed to help the environment). The draft tube concept is that the hoses coming off the valve cover get routed down below the car in a low pressure zone to help flow the fumes, oil, and water out of the tubes and onto the road rather than getting fed back into your engine to run through your turbo and combustion chambers. Happy turbo, happy valves, sad EPA. A PCV "delete", or capping off your PCV system is the opposite of good for the motor and you can expect increased oil consumption, you need flow through the valve cover area, not a completely sealed environment.

If you wanted to do the draft tube idea but still felt like spending extra money to keep the trees and EPA happy, run the hoses to a catch can then the outlet of the catch can down for the "draft tube" portion.

The thing is, the whole "periodic cleaning fixes the symptom, not the cause" is true and I agree a car with carbon build up built into the design is an absolutely stupid thing... it's not new or unique to these engines. Very few manufacturers putting out Direct Injection engines have found good ways to cure this issue. Many of them jumped the gun on the DI thing and started pumping out engines with it because it's more fuel efficient and better for the environment. The reason it's an issue on these motors and not traditional port injection is because the abrasive fuel used to run over the valves on it's way into the cylinders and now it doesn't.

It's not just the PCV system depositing a lot more contaminants over the head than if you had draft tubes or earlier designed heads, but also the fuel is no longer keeping the valves clean, so the carbon deposits can just settle and build up.

 

My other car has a catch can setup, and the outlet of the can runs to a diverter valve in the exhaust crossover pipe, just downstream of the sensors. Does a great job of venting the crankcase, and there is no odor, but you know the can is filling up when you take a hard corner and it blows blue smoke out the exhaust ha ha. I'd hate to run that setup on a daily driven car though, because it's extra work.

I realize all engines build up crankcase pressure, especially those with F/I. I just don't want any connection between the intake and the breather system. On the Mini, I have the PCV capped, and the driver's side breather hose runs to a breather filter mounted to the firewall. This seems to work well, but you can smell crankcase vapors once in awhile. I'm going to a vented catch can setup mounted under the left headlight, and I'll see how this works out.
I appreciate the info about the carbon issues caused by DI. I think that's definitely a concern, but the pics I've seen of the issue in addition to the oil slime I found on the insides of my intake tubes leads me to think the PCV system on these engines is a major contributor to the problem.

 

It definitely is. The PCV design combined with DI makes for some nasty build up on the valves as well as quite a bit more oil than I'd prefer going back through the intake.

 

You are getting way ahead of yourself here. You can't compare the MINI's PCV system with another car. Yes, the principle in operation is the same, but the baffling and check valve system integral to the valve cover is unique. Dont' forget the ridiculous plastic swinging door baffles you can't even see or service. Plug the front PCV port and when you're in low-load/idle engine operation, the crankcase pressure builds up and you're now burning oil. When I mistakenly experimented with this to see if the breather tube could keep up, it does for a while. And then you see the smoke start to come out of the tailpipe. The MINI PCV design simply does not tolerate the plugs.

People have this idea that the MINI is gargling and guzzling oil mist. That is completely over exaggerated. It may take 30,000 miles to gunk up the intake ports/valves. That is A LOT of miles. You're certainly not going to melt a cat in that time frame. That is going a bit overboard. Whoever told you that would happen on the MINI needs to be slapped in the face. No joke.

Catch cans are a band-aid. The amount of vendors riding the bandwagon is very entertaining. People love throwing money at them. Spend that money on tools you can use time and time again. Not some stupid $5 can marked up to $300!

I don't have a media blaster. However, if you're careful enough you can do a damn good job cleaning everything by hand and the most expensive tool you need is an air compressor.

 

+1 this is what i do. I put a cap on my intake manifold and a plug in my turbo outlet and ran draft tubes under the car off both pcv outlets. works great for me. no unusual oil burning.

 

I'm most likely going to do that soon, too. Just got to spring for the plugs whenever I'm not being lazy about buying small cheap car parts lol.

 

I appreciate your insight on this. As I said earlier in the thread, I'm going to keep playing around until I find the best setup for my car. My car has 27k on it, and the amount of oil present in the intake tube tells me it was indeed 'guzzling and gargling' oil mist. My wife's 2013 MCS just hit the 10k mark, and I am looking to come up with a good enough setup to hopefully head the issue off at the pass with hers.

I work on vehicles for a living, and to me, the idea of having to go in there and physically clean out oil gunk every 30k is laughable. Sucking that much oil through the PCV system is the real band-aid here, and I hope to be able to address the underlying issue of crankcase ventilation. Drawing in that much oil WILL have a detrimental effect on all sorts of parts in the intake and exhaust systems...maybe not in 30k miles, but my wife and I are planning to keep our cars much longer than that.

I agree with you that spending $200 on a catch can setup for our cars is pretty silly. The one that I have on my other car set me back a whopping $60 or so, IIRC, and that was including the purchase of the exhaust evac kit and welding the diverter valve into the crossover pipe. Catch cans are not band aids; they're as old as the internal combustion engine itself, and common on engines with F/I.

I plan to pick up a couple of $25 Ebay catch cans for our cars, and it's about another $20 worth of hoses and a $9 breather filter to install them. So we're not talking about a huge outlay.

 

I heated my PCV hose at the valve cover side connection and pulled it apart. I put a rubber vacuum cap over the PCV side and clamped it. For the hose end, I took a 1/4"x 1/8" pipe brass bushing, slid a vacuum cap over the threads, and cut the end off so I was left with a thick rubber sleeve. I installed this into the end of my PCV hose and clamped it. Into the brass bushing, I threaded a 1/8" pipe x 1/8" hose barb fitting, and connected my boost gauge line to it. Killed two birds with one stone.

5/8" vapor hose works really well to connect to the valve cover. I reduced it down to 1/2" to go into the breather. Easy as pie.

 

also check into cleaning the valves yourself, its posted a few threads down. should be excellent info for any R56S owner as its time consuming but not terribly hard - and saves you a boat load of moolah

 

I didn't read the usernames carefully, and thought we were reducing ourselves to hilarious name-calling. I did get a chuckle...

As a general comment: We regularly do walnut shell services on cars, and see no improvement on cars with catch cans: they just don't help with build-up. I know this has been discussed, and there are a lot of opinions on it, but I'm just offering my experience, nincompoops.

 

Yes cans work on many other models but really, the MINI is slightly different. The amount of work people are putting into custom catch cans and cramming their engine bay with tons of plumbing is like watching a comedy show. It is a band aid for the MINI! Turning the PCV system on the MINI into a Rube Goldberg device is some of the most head shaking engineering work you can witness on NAM. The people that go through with it only think it works based on how much time they don't want to admit they wasted. Cleaning it yourself is a guaranteed no BS performance gaining solution!

Not to sound like a cocky *** but I've had the r56 MINI for a while and know what works. It is just really hard to watch new owners not learn anything from what others have learned. That is what a forum is supposed to be about.

But this is only advice.

 

It does suck that denial sometimes provokes people to spread misinformation because they made the mistake and wont admit it was a mistake. I completely agree.

With that said, a catch can, as I said above, DOES have a place on an FI car, but to think it's going to change the carbon build up issue on these motors is false hope in an overpriced soda can with fittings on it.

 

It's alright...if I'm wrong about it, I'll admit it. You may be 100% spot on with the carbon issue. Lying about the results to save face doesn't help anyone.

There are performance benefits to keeping oil out of the intake tract as well. I'm just not comfortable with oil vapors plumbed back into the intake.

 

I'm one of those guys that bought into the OCC setup just after I got my car 2 years ago. I did a little research at the time and spent the $$ on one. 30k miles later, I'm scheduled for a carbon cleaning next month. I will ask the dealer to rate it, but when I looked in the ports in August there was an even coating in the ports, but not too crusty by the valves like I have seen in other posts.

I don't think it is a waste of money here in Buffalo, because for 6-8 months out of the year, I get between 2 and 6 oz of water out of the catch can. My guess is that this is from the cold temp of the catch can, and the condensation as the engine cools down. I normally get some frothy crap on the top of the water, but no solid oil. I feel better that this water is not going through my engine, but maybe I'm just rationalizing spending $200 on something.

Overall, I agree that we just need to plan on cleaning the intake ports every so often.

Mike

 

I don't know why people are worried about water vapor passing through their engine. It's just water. Water is a product of the combustion part of an internal combustion engine.

 

I agree completely. I've run the rear PCV port plugged for a while and started seeing the smoke out the tailpipe recently. Put a draft tube there and the smoke is gone. Catch cans don't work on the front PCV port unless it's VTA either.

 

What was your method of creating the draft tube, barnoun?

Just curious, because with the setup we have, there are many different ways it could be done. I still need to get myself to at the minimum, buy the plus for the intake tube and manifold so I can light the fire under my *** to get this little project done lol.