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I put one on my '13 E350 because it has direct injection so no way to wash the valves. When I pulled the boot off just before the throttle blade I could see the blade was oily and the bottom was wet with oil. I opened the blade, or remove it, I forget, and everything inside looked like it had been freshly douched in oil. This is a serious problem.....
A friend said he had a super duper oil separater made for aircraft so I tried it, but highly suspicious because looking at it I'm thinking no way it'll work. After a few days or so there's maybe a 10-20 drops of oil in it... So I fabbed up a real filter and put it after his and my filter caught a butt-load of oil.
So if you have an E350 I can go into detail on how I did it without damaging anything oem.
Now I have a '16 E550 and I don't even know where the frikkin PCV lines are!
Edit/Note: The catch cans you see online are junk too, but there is one that appears like it'll work. I'll see if I can find the name, plus it's really cheap and looks oem
Ok, the one I made that actually catches all the oil is this thing: ebay.com/itm/223292342591
I used 1/2" OD tubing (.035" wall) because using normal fittings would be much more restrictive. I used a 1/4" NPT Die to put threads on the tubing so it would thread into the filter housing, plus some teflon tape to seal the sloppy fit. From there I can run 1/2" ID rubber hose. Or you could drill/tap the housing for 1/2 or 3/4" NPT and use store bought fittings, but I like being different and it looked sleeker.
See that white thing at the bottom of the housing? It's a cotton (I assume) filter b/c normally you're supposed to put DI beads in it (or whatever bends your barb) and you don't want them going out the exit hole, or balling up in front it. I wanted similar so I cut a Scotch Brite pad into a disc, two discs I think, and put them down there. Then for extra measure I put a ball of stainless wool down there. The kind you scrub pots with and I got a bag of 4 or 6 from Walmart. The idea is to make certain my oil catching media won't block the exit. What is said media you ask? Super high tech Kirkland paper towels from Costco! I'd roll them up, no hole in the middle, which I think took ~12 sheets? Those Costco PT's are half sheets so I mean 12 half sheets. I made my roll a bit less tight than they come on the roll in the first place. You want it tight enough so no chance any oil mist can get by, but not needlessly restrictive. I'd usually make it a bit too fat to fit in the filter, so an extra couple sheets, then remove sheets until I could get it in the DI housing snug so no air/oil can slip by, but not to snug I'm crushing the roll trying to get in all the way in. A couple inches are left sticking out which I cut off even w/ the top of the filters body. Now there's adequate space between the inlet tube and paper roll so air can take the path of least resistance, as opposed to the paper being shoved against the inlet hole. And as mentioned, the exit side of the roll has plenty of stuff preventing the same at the exit. Yes I know this is still rather restrictive compared to the oem setup but I figure the oem setup has an excess of air flow, and half the air, or even a quarter, but dry air, is better than full flow + oil.
Also, this was more of a test to see how the super catch can (per my friend) was working.
Fyi; the paper towels never broke apart or anything so the stainless wool was not needed at all. But I changed my filters after 4-6 weeks, so who knows what would happen if left for a year or more, or if soaking wet and you hit it w/ pressure from a turbo.
Here's the deal w/ catch cans (imo): People buy stuff but rarely check to see if they're actually doing what's claimed, which is imo how many shty products keep selling and snake oil salesmen make a living. I test stuff all the time and good or bad I will spread the word. So all the people that want a catch can are doing the right thing, and I'm glad, but odds are really high (imo) that the can you get is not doing much. After I put my PT dealie behind my friends super can, the super can again caught 10 or so drops and the paper had caught substantially more. Hard to compare since it's all soaked into the paper and I can't measure it, but I can tell you that when I remove the paper element it had some weight to it. So my guess is the super can caught 1%, but even if I give it the bennie of the doubt and say 5%, it's still useless.
How do I know mine is catching all the oil? The inlet end is wet, the exit end is dry. At least for the first week b/c it'll wick down there. So to test that I cut the PT roll up into three parts and placed Scotchbrite discs between them to stop wicking. Sure enough the first section filled up while the second was barely tinted on top w/ oil and the third one looked new. So clearly it's catching all the oil. That was for ~two weeks, so ~500 miles. So I left it in another two weeks and the first stage got darker, the second was starting to look like the first did two weeks prior, and stage three starting to get oil tinted at the top like stage two was. My guess is it could go quite a while before actually allowing oil past, but I decided 4 weeks would be the change interval since it's easy to swap and paper towels are cheap. Glad I bought a bunch before Covid!
I got rid of the E350 not long after so that was the end of that but I learned a lot. Like the oem oil separator in the PCV system either doesn't work at all or not very well at all, so a low mileage car was sucking a lot of oil. And of course I learned it's not easy to catch oil period, which may be the oem parts whole problem, but also that a catch can that does not use an element filter is likely not going to work.
This DI filter thing is thin and fit well diagonally behind the right headlight. The tubing and making the other ends fit the car is a whole nuther story but doable w/o damaging anything. Details on request.
The new catch can I found is the only one I see that I think might actually work, and it's super cheap. It's the Provent 200 and it comes with a stainless steel screen filter with many layers of screen. This is why I think it may work. I say may because I know it won't work as well as mine, but hopefully it'll work well enough. They also make one with what appears to be some sort of fiber element that I'd imagine is even better but possibly more restrictive? The housing is fat and needs to be more or less vertical to work so finding the room for it in my car will not be easy at all. It has massive 1"OD in/out tubes which is sweet, but more redneck engineering to make them fit smaller tubes. As a bonus it has a vent in the lid to dump positive pressure if needed. My filter did not have a vent, but kinda did b/c the 1/2" ID hoses were just slid over the 1/2" OD tubing so I est 1psi would pop them off. As expected they never came off. If the Provent fails and I need to make another PT filter, I'll use a bigger tube for more air flow since my current car has a bigger eng and is turbo. I'm guessing 3", maybe 4" tubing?
Provent 200 w/ stainless screen: ebay.com/itm/143462698364
Provent w/ fiber element: ebay.com/itm/163831675691
I do have a few pix, which I forgot I had. I found the car I really wanted so I removed this setup before taking any more. Pix like with the plastic covers on showing it all fit and was invisible with the exception of the filter, which if I had kept I'd probably make a cover for. But I also wanted to try that Provent 200 which is big, and I'd have to have mine in there after it to verify the Provent works. Lets just say I wasn't looking fwd to it so it never happened. My new car has even less room under the hood, and I don't know where the pcv hose(s) are so it's back burner. I will take more pix next time!
The SS tubes ended under the cold air intake tube simply because snaking the tubing in there didn't allow for for them to be any longer. If I had to guess they had four bends each to find their way and dodge all the stuff like the belt. So from that point under the cold intake tube and the filter I used 1/2" ID rubber hose. You could use rubber hose all the way spoze, but it was too tight under there for the fat rubber hose I had so my guess is you'd want thin wall hose, yet strong enough not to collapse under 20+ in vacuum, flexible enough to snake around stuff and not fall apart or turn to mush when exposed to oil. This is why I used stainless steel tubing...
I used zip ties to secure the hose on the tubes under the intake, but not on the filter. This way I didn't have to worry about the connections I couldn't see, and if one popped off at the filter I'd know the filter was too restrictive. Plus it made removing the filter super easy for inspection and element swapping.
Considering how much oil was getting caught I can only assume the following: The oem PCV oil separator is broke, or it's simply not effective. I'm going with the latter because I've had many devices for cars and other things to separate oil and none of them work. Well, with the exception of one at work that's huge and probably 100lbs.
The rubber tape I used to span the gap between the 1/2" tube and oem holes was likely silicone? Not sure b/c I've had it for like 10-15yrs and it hasn't degraded at all so I assume not normal rubber. Once wrapped and shoved in the holes, I used small but long zip ties to ensure the tubing had constant tension holding it tight in the oem fitting. Basically one ziptie wrapped tight around the tube which one or two zipties were looped under. Then those zipties connected to whatever to pull the tubing into the hole, if that makes sense. Like on the oem elbow fitting the tie simply went around the elbow. The other end was trickier and I forget exactly how I did it, but I'm sure you'll find the same or some place to make it happen.
My original thought was to cut the elbow fitting and epoxy in the SS tube, but that would involve a lot more work putting it back to stock since the new buyer would no doubt not understand. Plus I'm guessing I'd need a bank loan to buy a new elbow.
Thanks for the deets!! i want to remove this damn thing ASAP. my last direct injection engine started having issues due to the carbon build up on the valves. Friggin emissions..
I rec'd a weird message in my normal emails junk mail, from you (Flash Gordon) it claims, about CRC valve cleaner in an E400.
The link to reply takes me to this site but no message anywhere or my inbox. Is that really you or some weird sneaky spam?
08-16-2020, 05:18 PM
