Now I had this small oil leak for almost a year now, kept coming back and I kept scratching my head thinking where it’s coming from… till the last ridout where we went to Kielder forest, and “all in” it was a 500 miles trip.

**Picture:** A mess on the driveway that was made literally in 2 minutes **(note, xt is nice and clean already!)**

The problem was that my trusty xt started leaking oil like crazy! When i’m commuting, i don’t use motorways, and engine revs normally around 3.5k rpm, but when i was on motorway, it lost so much oil that i had to add oil every couple of hundred miles! All underside was covered in oil, all swingarm – proper mess!

Now here is a thing, I drowned my xt last year in Salisbury Plain.. and at home i took all the engine covers off to inspect it and to clean it. So when it started to leak oil, naturally I traced my steps back, and I thought: ” I took the covers off, probably didn’t seal it when placing them back on!”. So I cleaned all the oil off the engine, took covers off, cleaned all the surfaces, reapplied the covers back on… still leaks. Problem was that when idling, not a drop of oil was seen. And when riding oil gets pushed everywhere by wind and it’s hard to tell where it’s coming from… So I jumped back and forth on my xt like this for some time, fixing one thing at the time.. You can read more about our trip round Salisbury Plain and how I drowned my xt here!

And then a friend of mine suggested we visit Kielder forest! I thought why not, and evening before the trip, I thought I’ll check that leak again! I disconnected crankcase breather box from the air filter box, and blew some air inside of the crankcase breather with the idea that perhaps I’ll hear where there is a gap for that oil to come out!

What I heard was a bit like “pop, whoooooooshhhhhh…” … And it hit my head like a ton of bricks. All this time looking for a leak, just to find out that it was the crankcase breather pipe that came off of the engine case!

**Picture:** *Since this pipe sits in a very very hard to reach place, picture was taken on the spare engine…*mine – *no way near as clean!*

What caused this mysterious oil leak on my XT660Z?

I imagine the crankcase breather pipe came off when I drowned my xt in Salisbury plain, as all air filter box got filled with water, some (i mean a lot) got inside of the engine too. So I assume when the piston went up, it created the vacuum and sucked water in through the breather box, and when the piston went back down, it created pressure, but water couldn’t get out of the breather and pipes quick enough, and all that pressure found a weak spot, and that was the pipe that doesn’t take a lot to take off or put back on as it’s a fairly loose fit on it, and secured with a pathetic wire clamp.

Now, did I upgrade that clip to something a bit more heavy? No – because I’m not planning to drown it again!