Today after work I did the elephant hose mod until I can get a CCV filter of some sort installed. I had a VW TDI that had intake clogging problems and I am NOT going to deal with that again!

Anyway, tonight I'm driving and come up to a stoplight after driving on the highway for a while. I see this cloud of smoke in my headlights...quite a bit. When I get home, I look under there while the engine is running and sure enough, it's coming from the new hose. I had no idea such a large volume of fumes came through the CCV! I was shocked.

I really need to get some sort of filter on there. I can just imagine sitting at a stoplight and someone yelling over to me "hey buddy...somethings wrong with your car....smoke's coming out from under there ya know...."

I think (hope) most of the smoke is water vapor. It doesn't really seem to make a mess. I can't find it now, but I saw a post on a Ford diesel forum that talked about an "exhaust bung" to tie the crank vent into the exhaust. Anybody else heard of this? Seems like you'd want to do it after the cat? It would be all bad if you had enough backpressure on the exhaust that it forced exhaust back into the engine through the vent.

I have seen and used filters which remove oil from compressed air. They are pretty much a must before a dessicant air dryer. Is that what you are thinking of from McMaster or MSC? I am not dismissing the idea, but these filters are designed to run at much higher pressure (100 to 120 PSI). If they need even a small amount of differential pressure across them to work, they aren't going to work as a crank vent filter. I don't know how much differential they need, I'm just saying if they need much - it ain't there. It would be worth looking into, but we would need some numbers about crankcase pressure on the CRD. I can't speak for Old Navy, but I think the intent of his project is to make something that is purpose built for the application. Something that looks like it belongs there and doesn't eat up underhood space, which is already minimal.