Oil Breather/Generator Pedestal

By Mike Palermo Jr.

I get to witness a lot of ingenuity applied to the Vee engines that arrive here for rebuild or trade-in. For the most part this is interesting, sometimes inspirational, sometimes scary.

One of the scary areas is the oil breather/generator pedestal. A deviation from the factory design here can easily cause your early exit from an event due to either the dreaded "meatball" flag, or worse yet because of a locked-up engine.

The most prominent areas of problems are these:

The oil deflector plate beneath the generator stand. There are eight possible ways to install this plate and only one of them will contain the oil in the sump as it was designed to do. The louvers must hang down into the block, and run in the same direction as the split in the case. Furthermore, the slots must lay such that when you look through them you are looking towards the1-2 side of the engine. Lastly it is important that you never remove nor restrict this plate.

The oil filler reservoir is another potential trouble spot. If you look inside, you will notice that there is a curved slot cut out for approximately 90 degrees or 1/4 of the circle. The factory sets this slot so that it is centered at 12 o'clock. This allows the blow-by to escape without taking oil along. When you rotate this reservoir to aid in the positioning of your breather hose, or for body clearance, you can defeat this design and cause excess oil to be pumped out of the breather tube. There are 4 different reservoir designs that I am aware of, and one of these will work properly in your situation without jeopardizing your engine. I've also noticed that some of the aftermarket chrome units fail to lock the filler cap in place when it is twisted on. I find that if I use a small pair of channel lock pliers to form a depression at the end of the ramp which the cap tangs run up, the situation improves, but I have come to favor the VW factory units. They aren't shiny, but I would rather have my engine live than shine anytime.

GOOD RACING!!!

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