[Cautrell05]

I wanted the scripted valve cover no breather look for the engine. I had one of the old 327 cast iron intakes with the factory breather pipe and the four-barrel Holley flange. That would have functioned, but I felt like it needed to breathe a little better than that. Edelbrock still makes a performer RPM intake it comes with the oil pipe and it's machine from the factory. They're only 260 bucks on eBay but I still didn't want to spend that much. One of the extra intake manifolds they had from my racing days was Edelbrock 2101 just a standard aluminum performer. It was not drilled for the oil pipe but it had the area cast for it. Years back there used to be a lot of intake companies that did that. Now there's only one or two. So I built a jig at work from some leftover bits that held the intake up at an angle so that that filler pipe was straight up and down. Once the intake was mounted right angle I put it in the mill and with the help of my friend that runs the machine shop we bored the home in the front of the intake for the oil pipe. The next question is how to run the pcv. I could have just run a breather on that pipe but the downside of that is all your engine vapors are going to come out of there continuously as designed and be cleaning oil residue off the motor. And where I got a mile and a half of gravel between my house and the highway it would just end up being a constant mass. GM went away from a PCV valve and just went to a fixed orifice system probably a little over 15 years ago on most of their V8 engines. Did some reading on it and it's actually pretty simple to do. Basically you just got your intake vacuum port with the hose runs to the valve cover and somewhere in that passageway there's a restrictor with a small hole. Somewhere around 2:00 to 2 1/2 mm depending on the engine. That way you've got steady vacuum to the crankcase to pull out fuel fumes which also helps prevent minor leaks and compensate for blow by at idle. Pretty much the way you check it on mine it was easiest I took my vacuum gauge and I hooked it to the dipstick tube and I took my hand and I pulled it the end of the pipe on the intake. You should have somewhere around 3 inches of vacuum at idle. If you got more than that you need a smaller restrictor, if you got less than that you need a larger restrictor.
The restrictor was made from just a piece of aluminum bar stock on the lathe. Center drilled it through the middle and then cut the outside down small enough that it would be a fairly tight fit and the PCV hose. Which in this case is just a piece of 3/8 fuel line.