PCV valve

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truman911

Junior Member
Joined
Sep 14, 2021
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Location
El Paso, Tx
Ram Year
1997
Engine
5.2
Hello, I have a 97 Dodge ram 1500 5.2 it is consuming quite a bit of oil, about a quart a month. Ive noticed the pcv valve makes some noise when the engine is running and if you touch it you can feel it vibrating like crazy. I have replaced it with the cheap valves from Auto Zone and Oreilys. Does the same thing. Is this normal for the valve to be making noise like this? I dont remember it doing that when the truck was new. BTW I did check if I had vacuum coming from the manifold. I read about a bad plenum gasket so I did the test for it. Any suggestions? thanks
 

Dodge trucker

Senior Member
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Dec 29, 2021
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Location
Kankakee il
Ram Year
1985
Engine
225
how many miles do you drive in a month? 100? 1000? 10000? it's different for everyone.
Either plenum gasket or valve guide seals are bad. I have a 360 in a Durango that uses a quart in 1500 or so. It varies a bit, sometimes 2 qt, sometimes 3 qt between oil changes. Certainly not enough I'm gonna lose any sleep about.. about 160k on short block, 290k on body. Brand new EQ heads put on, when I swapped the motor at 258K. was a used engine I picked up via CL. I regasketed everything, before I dropped the replacement motor in// and took heads in "just to check" while apart// and machine shop claimed they were cracked (all those heads cracked between the valves, never seemed to hurt a thing) Burning a quart of oil occasionally won't hurt a thing. Also while it was apart, I replaced the plenum plate with a 1/4" aluminum one. Stock is sheet steel. some of the problem with them has to do with dissimilarity in expansion and contraction in steel vs the aluminum that the rest of the manifold is made of. and these are bolted together.

I have a 78 Fury (318) and used to have an 89 Diplomat (also 318) that used to go thru a quart every 650 miles. I wound up having to replace valve guide seals on both.
and those cars went down to using 1 qt per oil change. They'd be down 1 qt right at oil change time. (every 4k for me) so I never had to add, after replacing those guide seals. cost about $15/set of seals, plus a set of valve cover gaskets. If you have the right spring compressor and an air compressor, those seals can be done without removing heads!
these 2 vehicles are carbureted, and didn't even have a plenum plate. the valve guide seals can fall apart and into the pan or they can be in place and intact looking, but they get hard as a rock so they lose their ability to seal.
With the Fury and Diplomat even when they were at their worst for oil consumption it never showed on the plugs and other than an occasional puff, didn't smoke out the exhaust.

had a Dodge van with 318 Magnum (same engine you have// I hate engines being called out by "liter" designations, was brought up on good old "cubic inches") at work that was doing the quart in 600 miles thing, and I replaced the intake plenum gasket and that solved it.
 
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