The Mystery of the Leaking Air filter!

I was privy to an email conversation between my good friend Peter of Freespirit Adventure
who is also on twitter at @peterfrancon, and my bullet friend and touring buddy Vishwas – @vishwasma on twitter..

And seeing how much of enfield gyan Vishu has gained from Guru Nandan and how much of his writing style actually fits the bullet blogger mould.. I had to blog this for you.

And also helps that @vishwasma is way too lazy to do any such thing as a blog..

Read on ..
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Hey Peter,

Thought the White sticky oil needed more description for one to truly understand what was happening.

There sits a black cylindrical box underneath the seat called the breather box. It’s function – to collect excess oil that sometimes spills out from the crank as the piston pushes down and in some cases/models put it back into the engine through the timing case.

If the oil leaking of the air filter is More whitish, gluey that oily and is not very persistent/continuous – You have just returned from a ride where you accelerated to hard (chasing cars? climbing mountains?). The input to the Box was greater than it could handle and hence the overflow. Not really mission critical.It will stop with time, air filter is the only guy really threatened. If you are very particular, you could get the breather box cleaned/emptied. No personal experience with this, i have just let it run.
(The whiteness Of the oil is a reaction of hot oil with Air and vapor!!)

If the oil leaking of the air filter is More oily and less white (more red/black) – It could be trouble. Yours is one of the those bikes in which the breather box was suppose to put the oil back into the engine through the timing case. This is a highly experimental concept at Royal Enfield.

(Ok, if you are not dead of boredom already, wake up, below text requires concentration and imagination)

Inside the timing case the washer (a tiny roundish blue-black fellow) I was talking about exists. The function of this washer is to stop the oil pump (that circulates the oil) from creating enough pressure so that fresh oil from your oil slump (where you put the oil) is NOT sent back into the breather box (through the path which was suppose to bring in the excess oil collected in the breather box into the timing case !!).

If the washer is conked, the oil pump will continuously pump oil into the breather box and cause a continuous splurge of oil out of the breather, into the air filter and onto the silencer. As the oil burns on the silencer, you will look like a smoke machine.
This does not stop with time. You risk low oil levels.

The timing cover is the right hand ride of the bike (see attached photo). Please don’t get too adventurous with it. It best to leave it to a Mechanic.

If you figure that the cause was something other than either of the 2 mentioned, please let me know. Lot to learn!!

Regards,
Vishwas

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