[Healeys] excess oil consumption

[warthodson at aol.com]

A friend ask me to post the following question about excess oil consumption on this forum to see if anyone has any suggestions.
I know the engine has been professionally rebuilt a few years ago & the compression & leak down tests recently looked "normal". No oil leaks. 
Thanks,
Gary Hodson

I had a brief conversation with my mechanic the other day and in the next couple of weeks he will do a complete diagnosis on my Healey to try to identify why I have had so much oil consumption.  FYI, I just emptied the 6th quart of oil into the engine yesterday – and that is over 4,000 miles.  It is better than before the recent ring job, but nonetheless, is not acceptable to me.
 
Mechanic thinks the oil loss might be due to combustion of the oil from the back air cleaner that is plumbed with the valve cover.  He thinks the air cleaner I have on it now is somehow creating a vacuum pulling oil from the valve cover and injecting it back into the piston and is actually burning the oil off very efficiently.  I still don’t have any signs of leaks beneath the car nor any smoke from the tailpipe.  Quite possibly the current Cooper air cleaners are too small and are creating this vacuum.  The Cooper air cleaners replaced some other chrome air cleaners the original owner had on the car – I don’t know if it was original equipment.
 
Will you do me a favor and see if anyone else had a similar issue with oil consumption to identify a “solution” that worked for them?  Maybe there are other thoughts that we should ask my mechanic to examine as well.
 
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