As a result of the comments received in respect to my earlier post on this I decided to have a look under the plate to see what the filter looks like following my attempt to clean it. I was also concerned that when I banged the cover bits were dropping out from behind the plate. The bits seemed to be bits of carbon / the remains of burnt old oil. In fact I ended up looking under the plates that were fitted in three rocker covers that I had in my garage. One I had attempted to clean by just flushing it with white spirits. The other two I had initially flushed them but followed this by attempting to burn the contents out.
I can’t say how many miles they have been on the various cars but club members who know me and my cars will already know that at least one of my cars has covered over 300,000 miles.
The outcome is I certainly recommend that you have a look under the plate if you have a high mileage car because I was shocked to see what was left under there. Only one looked anything like what I would consider as being acceptable. See the attached photographs.
My question for the experts is why was the filter there and do I need to replace it?
On the stag i used stainless steel wire wool ,to replace the original,another mod i did was make a slide panel,makes it easier to clean out in the future, on the stag its at the back of the cam cover easier to do than yours as yours is in the middle of cam cover
Its surprising how dirty they get,over time
The wife purchased today for me a stainless steel pot scourer from Sainsbury's and I also obtained one from Nisbets. The latter is somewhat courser so I will have to decide which type to use. It has also been suggested that I could just remove the old and not replace it with anything.
It was a bit cold working in the garage so I ended up surfing the net on the subject and this informed me that the baffle plate is in the rocker cover to prevent oil mist being directly drawn into the breather pipes and that a material with a high surface area (standard material being wirewool in the rocker cover) is used to "catch" the oil mist so that it forms into blobs and falls down and is returned to the crankcase. What I found in at least two out of the three rocker covers that I have opened up was far too contaminated to have done this effectively. The one I had just attempted to clean by flushing with white spirits was basically a solid block. The other two I had attempted to burn out clean with a gas torch but even one of these still had a lump of old oil still within the wirewool. I will be interested to see if new wirewool will improve the engines oil consumption.
To get the old wirewool out I cut away the brazed joints on the vent pipe side and bent up the baffle plate. I have now drilled a small hole and fitted from the outside a small self tapping screw to hold the Baffle plate down in its place again. This means that I can carefully bend the baffle plate up again to inspect / change the wirewool if I want to in the future.
If the weather continues to be cold I may write up an article on the subject for Dolly Mixture
Thanks to everyone who did previous work on their breather systems. You inspired me to do the same, so I purchased a spare cam cover from eBay (I've thrown several out in the past) and set about removing the mesh trap. On the 1850 (on this cover anyway) there are three spot welds on each side holding it on. Through trial and error I discovered the easiest way to remove the mesh retaining plate is to use a 4.5mm drill straight through the spot welds. This is a trial run so I can fit this cover temporarily and do a better job on the original.
The cam cover itself was in a worse state than the ebay photo's suggested, so quite a bit of external surface rust to clean off and lots of carbon to be scraped off the inside. Yes, carbon, and not just under the mesh filter retainer! It looks OK now, time to get some stainless mesh, rivet the cover back on, seal with some high temperature epoxy resin and paint the outside to make it look pretty:
GTS290N wrote: ↑Tue Sep 18, 2018 7:50 pm
Thanks to everyone who did previous work on their breather systems. You inspired me to do the same, so I purchased a spare cam cover from eBay (I've thrown several out in the past) and set about removing the mesh trap. On the 1850 (on this cover anyway) there are three spot welds on each side holding it on. Through trial and error I discovered the easiest way to remove the mesh retaining plate is to use a 4.5mm drill straight through the spot welds. This is a trial run so I can fit this cover temporarily and do a better job on the original.
The cam cover itself was in a worse state than the ebay photo's suggested, so quite a bit of external surface rust to clean off and lots of carbon to be scraped off the inside. Yes, carbon, and not just under the mesh filter retainer! It looks OK now, time to get some stainless mesh, rivet the cover back on, seal with some high temperature epoxy resin and paint the outside to make it look pretty:
Not sure about using pop rivets,there leak,there are some good glues you could use,or send it to me and ill weld it for you
I have only recently noted that there was a very slight leak of oil out of the rocker cover where I fitted the self tapper screw to hold the plate back inside the cover so last week I used some resin to stop this leak.
