Hitchcocks Forum

Whoops, a sunny day I just stopped to fill up my 2005 model Electra 500 . Awful unridable miss fire. Managed to get home. Black sooty plug, oil leaking from breather collector box, examined airfilter to find half a pint of clean engine oil. I have clean the filter in petrol. Any ideas please on how to prevent further flooding of OIL. The fun of being new to ENFIELDS

You have put too much oil in.

Or it could be wet-sumping. This is what happened to mine when I left it parked for a few months without moving the crank to TDC.



New air filter, full clean out of the air filter box, and adjustment of the engine oil level - everything fine again after that.

Thack my Electra X wet sumps whatever suggested precautions I take. It does not however smoke, because I start it but let it tickover for five minutes before riding it. (I keep the oil level half way between the dip-stick marks checked by using the run the engine for minute or so, and checking the level a couple of minutes after stopping the engine.)

papasmurf writes: "Thack my Electra X wet sumps whatever suggested precautions I take. It does not however smoke, because I start it but let it tickover for five minutes before riding it. "

Indeed. Letting it tickover for five minutes will clear the sump without thrashing much, if any, oil out of the breather. My point is that if you DON'T do that, and just drive away after starting when it has wet-sumped, then it'll pump the oil into the air filter. That will happen even if there is the right amount of oil in there.

It sounds like your bike still has the original factory breather/catch can set-up fitted, this happened with mine when new. This isn't necessarily due to wet sumping, the breather system is prone to getting blocked by the condensed goo, sometimes referred to as mayonnaise, which builds up in dips in the breather pipe run. Crankcase pressure then has to vent from the oil tank via the timing chest, forcing oil up through the pipe at the back into the catch-can (this is the pipe the catch-can should be **draining** from!) and then into the air filter housing, from where it 1) clogs the filter making the engine run too rich and 2) pours out over the bike and onto the road/garage floor.

For some reason I lost part of my post about a fix! All sorts of owner-derived variations have been tried, here's an easy one. Remove the old catch-can and breather pipes and seal up the breather pipe unions at the back of the timing chest and the primary chain case cover. Take the larger diameter breather hose with the 90 degree bend and fit the short end over the oil tank breather connection, run the rest over the rear chain by the gearbox sprocket and trim to length. Salvage the short "duck bill" breather valve from the catch can and fix this to the end of the shortened breather hose with a bit of 12mm O/D tube and a couple of clips.









Now if you ride with this all should be well all the time you don't thrash the bike or overfill the oil tank, otherwise you will have some more cleaning to do. You could also use your own catch bottle and a longer piece of hose if you like to give the bike a bit more welly, just make sure your hose run has no dips for the mayo to collect in and cause a blockage.



A.

Dear all, thank you all for comments and suggestions. I have now cleaned out all the breather pipes and collector can. Yes they all had a mayonnaise coloured sludge in them. I am fitting our hosts stage 1 kit and down pipe soon and will take Adrians advice on removing the collector can altogether. I washed the contaminated air filter in petrol, unfortunately I only had a NGK7 spark plug.and now very small miss fire. I always run the engine for 5 mins before ridding and have never (yet) had smoke from the exhaust on start up. Must have been a blockage I hope. Once again thank you all.

Hi Adrian, Do I seal off the primary and timing chest pipes? I can clearly see what to do with the crank case breather. Thank you

Have a look here. http://www.whfolk.co.uk/REOCHUMBER/Arti ... eather.htm
Adrian has the right idea but it's better to lead the breather up behind the battery before bring it down to the chain.