(soft music)
- What, you're gonna act like you didn't see
what happened last week?
Well in case you actually didn't see
what happened last week,
we took the Miata back to race track and it ran great.
The turbo felt good, it was making so much power.
But, it was also making a lot of oil leaks
and a lot of smoke.
So much oil was leaking that I stopped driving it
'cause I was worried it was gonna catch on fire.
So what does that mean?
Why is it leaking all this oil?
Is the Miata dead or can we fix it?
Today we're gonna revamp the entire PCV system on the Miata
and along the way, we're gonna install
a sick set of catch cans.
Talk about a PCV system, what a catch can is even,
why you may or may not need one, and much more.
- [Eddie] What's the much more?
- I don't know.
I'm Zach and this is "Money Pit,"
it's still Wednesday, my dudes.
(yelling)
(lighting strike)
(upbeat music)
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Now if you'll excuse me,
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Real men can cry.
(upbeat music)
- Okay, so before we go tearing into things,
we need to understand our problem a little bit better.
So we know we've got a massive among of oil leaks,
buy why, what happened?
Did all of our seals and gaskets just decide
to go bad at the same time?
No, that's not what's happening.
We're pressurizing our crankcase
and pushing oil out of all the seals and gaskets.
So the problem that we're having is that our crankcase
is filling with pressure.
What does that mean?
First off, what even is our crankcase?
Well the crankcase is all of the free space
in your engine basically.
Where your crank shaft lives, it's where all your oil lives,
and all the free space in your valve covers.
And, rule of thumb, you don't want it to be under pressure.
In fact ideally, in a ideal world,
your crankcase would be under a vacuum all the time.
But inversely, when it's under pressure,
it'll do bad things like push oil out of all of the places.
So now we know that we don't want any pressure
in our crankcase, but we know that we have pressure
in our crankcase, so how's it getting in there?
Where's it coming from?
How's this happening?
So there's basically a few different ways
that pressure can leak into the crankcase
from other parts of your engine.
One of those ways is if your valve stem seals are bad.
And that's especially true on a boosted application
like this where our intake manifold
is seeing a lot of pressure.
If your valve stem seals are warn,
some of that pressure from your intake manifold
can leak pass the seals and get into your crankcase.
No good.
Now one of the other things is
if your head gasket is busted.
(yells)
Is there still a head gasket in here?
Nope, that would be a problem too.
Another way that pressure can get into your crankcase
is past your head gasket.
If you've got a leaky head gasket
that's letting some of the pressure
from your combustion chambers into the oiling system,
that will eventually end up in your crankcase
and pressurize it.
Now the most common way of all of the ways
for pressure to get into your crankcase
is what's called blow-by.
And that is basically pressure
leaking past your piston rings when your engine's running.
You see, each cylinder's making a bunch of pressure
and exploding and that's how the car runs, we know this.
Some of that pressure leaks past the rings.
If your rings are really warn,
a a lot of blow-by will get past the rings.
If your rings are brand freaking new,
your whole engine's brand new,
still a little bit of blow-by is gonna get past the rings.
So, now we know that we don't want pressure
in the crankcase,
but even on a brand new healthy engine,
there's gonna be a little bit of blow-by
putting a little bit of pressure into the crankcase.
So what do we do with the blow-by?
That's where the PCV system comes in.
It stands for positive crankcase ventilation
and it does exatly what it says,
it ventilates crankcase pressure.
Perfect, that's exactyly what we want.
It uses some clever thinking to basically extract
the pressure from the crankcase
and feed it back to the engine to be burnt
and spit out the tail pipe.
It's pretty sweet.
Now let's take a look at the Miata and talk about
what the PCV system used to look like
before I (beep) it up.
(upbeat music)
All right, so there are basically two sides
to the stock PCV system on the Miata,
and on a lot of cars.
So the first side goes from the intake manifold
at this nipple and it connects to the crankcase
by way of the valve cover,
and inline is our PCV valve.
Now this nifty little bugger is pretty trick.
And, can you hear that?
There's a little pentol inside which moves
depending on what's going on with your engine.
So since this is connected to your intake manifold
which is often under vacuum like when you're in idle,
the little pentol in here basically meters that vacuum
so that it doesn't act like a huge vacuum leak
and make the engine run poorly.
But it meters that and uses a little bit
of that vacuum to suck on the crankcase
and pull pressure out of it.
And then when you drive off and there's less vacuum
in your intake manifold,
that pentol opens up more to allow for more flow.
So, when there's the no vacuum,
that's where the other side of the PCV system
comes into play and that's the side that I ruined.
We've got this nipple at the valve cover
and you can see that some idiot put a cap on it.
- [Eddie] Who did that?
- I don't know.
So yeah, apparentlu I put a cap on this crankcase vent
at some point when we were doing
some makeshift intake stuff.
The idea is that this is connected
in front of the the throttle body.
So even when you're at wide open throttle
and on a naturally aspirated car,
your intake manifold is basically at ambient pressure,
there's still a lot of sucking happening,
a lot of negative pressure happening in the intake tube
because you're pulling in as much air as you can.
So, since we can connect this to our intake tube
in front of the throttle body,
this side of the PCV system is responsible
for removing pressure when we're ripping it,
which is what we were doing all day at the track.
Now on a turbo setup, basically the same deal,
it just needs to attach to the front of the turbo,
the inlet where this is only ever gonna see
the air being sucked into the turbo.
There's never gonna be any positive pressure here.
So when we're at wide open throttle making maximum boost
and our intake manifold is all pressurized,
this pipe is gonna be at the lowest pressure
it'll ever be because it's gonna be sucking in
as much air as possible.
So basically what we need to do today
is get this side of the PCV system working again,
which means we need to connect this vent to this tube.
But we're also gonna add some catch cans,
so what the heck are those and where do they come in?
Let's talk about it.
Well you see, blow-by and the crankcase pressure
that we're talking about, it's not just air.
It's full of a bunch of junk, bunch of little oil mist
and stuff that we don't really want our engine eating.
So that's where the catch can comes in.
It goes inline in our PCV system
and in our case, we have two catch cans.
So there will be a catch can on both sides
of the PCV system.
And then basically go inline and trap those contaminants.
They're basically like a filter.
Now, when does that really matter?
Because the truth is, it's got a PCV system
from the factory, no catch can, everything seems to be fine.
Well honestly, on an older car like the Miata
that has port fuel injection,
you can get away without a catch can.
Basically what's happening in a port fuel injection car
is that the fuel injectors are squirting fuel
in the ports of your intake manifold.
And now what that means is that every time fuel is squirted,
a lot of things get clean.
Your intake manifold gets cleaned by the fuel,
your valves are washed by the fuel,
and none of the junk
that's in your blow-by really builds up.
But on a newer car that has direct injection
where the fuel is injected directly into the cylinder,
none of that fuel wash occurs.
Your valves don't get cleaned,
your intake manifold doesn't get cleaned.
So all the contaminants in the blow-by
that we're talking about here can build up on your valves.
And they can build up a lot.
I've seen some crazy buildup.
So catch cans are super important on newer,
direct injected engines, especially if they're modified.
Got yourself a slick tune on your direct injected car?
You should definitely add a catch can.
So install should go pretty smoothly,
but there is one hitch.
Space is kind of at a premium in the old Miata's engine bay.
Let's look at where it's supposed to go.
They want it to go right over here by the turbo.
Now there's part of me that thinks
I could maybe wedge them in there, but I don't want to.
And the reason is that I don't want my catch cans
setup to be that close to my exhaust, turbo or not.
The fact is the catch can catches
a lot of contaminants that are flammable.
And if you ever over fill a catch can
or one leaks or any weird thing happens,
a line bursts and it's next to your exhaust,
well that's a recipe for a fire.
Ask my boy Dan Brocket.
I don't think I've ever used this fluid.
You're out, bud.
Anybody thirsty?
Little camelback.
Just hook 12 volts up to it, power camelback, baby.
(upbeat music)
All right, so we got the windshield washer bottle
out of the way the space is pretty nice,
so we're gonna move in.
We gotta get this thing mounted.
So I'm gonna mark a couple spots to drill some holes
and then we'll add some threads with our rivnut gun.
(hammering)
(drill buzzes)
Great, we got two holes,
now we just gotta put some threads in them.
We've got rivnuts, or threaded inserts.
These are super awesome.
They basically allow you to add threads to any hole.
Basically, you get these threaded inserts
and they kind of install like a rivet
in that they crush into place.
So we'll put this puppy on here.
And then the holes that we drilled
are just big enough for these to slip in.
So I'll slip 'em in,
and then I'm gonna put this thing down
and crush it into place and it'll forever be there.
Nice little thread.
So basically the idea is when I pull these handles together,
it'll pull these threads down and bulge out here
and sandwich itself in place against the front face here.
So, it's pretty simple, it's just a mechanical little,
actually do you wanna just waste one?
- [Eddie] Yeah.
- That's what happens.
- [Eddie] I totally missed it.
- For real?
(upbeat music)
Now with just a little bit of luck,
those threads will line up with our holes.
Whoa!
Okay, so now we can mount our catch cans in place
and then start plumbing them up.
I'm gonna put these fittings onto the cans,
and then I'm gonna put the cans in the bracket,
and then we can actually plumb it up.
But we gotta put these little adapters in.
(upbeat music)
All right, so now that we got our fittings on,
these cans are ready to go in the car.
(upbeat music)
All right, so the catch cans are in place
and they look pretty dope.
So now all that we have to do is plumb 'em,
which means basically reroute the whole PCV system
through the catch cans
and then back to how it's supposed to be.
So no big deal, should be pretty easy.
Hopefully I have enough hose,
because the routing that I'm doing is a little different
that radium intended.
So might have to make a trip to the store for some hose,
but I can handle that.
So let's get going.
Okay, so I mean, I want it to pretty,
but I don't care that much.
(upbeat music)
All right, so I was hoping to route this line
along the rear of the engine,
I thought that would look better.
But it gets a little too close to the turbo,
the routing was not very good.
So we're going at the front of the engine,
and actually it doesn't look that bad.
Now these fittings that they gave us are really nice.
These are called push lock fittings.
Okay, they were really nice.
They're AN on one side
and then they're push lock on the other.
These are really nice.
Basically it means they don't need hose clamps
for a setup like this.
They use the optimal angle of ceiling,
which I think is 37 degrees.
So these just plug into the hose that they gave us.
No hose clamps, super sick.
(upbeat music)
Okay, so we got our first hose plumbed,
now we need to plumb a line from the outlet of this can,
to the inlet pipe of the turbo.
So I'm gonna run the line,
then we'll worry about getting the barb
put into the turbo inlet pipe.
(upbeat music)
So we've got our 3/8 barb installed in our turbo inlet pipe.
Now a little disclaimer, this is pretty ugly
and this is not the ideal way to do this,
this is just kinda temporary for me
just to get things working.
Ideally, this would be a welded on piece of aluminum
that actually would extend into this tube here
with like a slash cut, which promotes a Venturi effect,
which actually create vacuum in the hose
that leads to our crankcase, which would be great.
(upbeat music)
These just seem a touch too small.
(upbeat music)
All right.
That's one side of our PCV system
and catch can plumbed, installed, completely done.
Now we just gotta do the same thing to the other side
which should be a little bit easier.
It's shorter and I don't have to add a barb.
Let's do it.
And I think I might have enough hose left, just barely.
You know me and my hose.
(upbeat music)
Little lube, helps the hose go on.
I think that's how that old song goes.
Teaspoon of lube helps the hose go on.
Unlike the other catch can,
this catch can is gonna see boost pressure.
Whenever we're making boost,
this catch can will be pressurized.
So it's extra important that all these fittings
are pressure tight.
Sealed up, you know what I'm talking about?
(grunts)
(upbeat music)
All right.
I need to tighten a few things up,
but that is one completed install.
That was pretty easy and honestly looks pretty cool.
There's some hoses running around,
but they look like they're there for a reason.
That's what I like.
With all the stuff that we did to this car
before turboing it to get it ready for turboing it,
this really is one of the things that I should've done.
It's kind of an oversight.
You need to have a fully functioning PCV system
if you're gonna turbo a car, keep that in mind.
Catch can's not withstanding, but they are a nice touch.
So I'm super excited to have a working PCV system
with some dope catch cans, and now,
the Miata should be ready to rip
without pushing a bunch of oil out everywhere.
(upbeat music)
Hopefully.
Once an oil leaks starts, does it ever really stop?
Thank you guys so much for watching.
I hope you had a good time, maybe learned a thing or two
about PCV systems and hopefully you learned from my mistakes
and don't do dumb stuff and then forget about it.
So I'll see you next Wednesday,
and in the meantime, don't forget to follow me on Instagram
@ZachJobe and follow Donut @DonutMedia, goodbye!
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