Well, I ended up biting the bullet, as the valve cover gasket and associated PCV seals were ouking oil so badly that I had to park the Jeep until I fixed it. I've pulled so much useful information from this site that I figured I'd give back a bit by doing a short writeup on the valve cover and PCV/CCV conversion and upgrade I did. My truck is an '89 Limited, the valve cover is from a '99, and the PCV parts are from various years and sources.
Here's what I started with:
The hose circled in red(which I mentioned in my original post) was beyond gone. I picked up this hose set from NAPA(Part Number 715-1366), as reccomended by other posts on this board:
For some reason, they decided to put a piece of rubber hose in the section of plastic hose that runs around the driver's side of the airbox. It's too short, and the plastic hose is glued into it. Needless to say, this connection came undone mid-assembly, so I'm going to replace it with a longer piece of rubber hose:
There are some other parts you need for this upgrade. Two valve cover fittings(circled in red and blue), plus the rubber adapter(circled in green) that comes from the hose set I got from Jeep:
The hose set is pictured here with the grommets for the fittings that go in the valve cover. The hose set isn't needed, just the rubber adapter:
The junkyard valve cover(make sure you get the oil filler cap!) and new gasket set. Make sure you get the rubber grommets and metal inserts that the bolts go through. You can use the old fittings if you don't want to buy new ones, but the ones in the valve cover I picked up were pretty well used:
Got the old cover off, and it looks like the PO wasn't so good about changing the oil. Looks like my XJ has some BG products in it's near future:
After cleaning up the new cover, and the gasket surface on the top of the head, I installed the new grommets and gasket, and installed the new steel valve cover:
After this, the only thing left was the modifications to the RENIX PCV/CCV system. Sourcing a length of bulk hose was a major PITA. The I.D. of the hose is 14mm, which is bigger than 1/2" and smaller than 5/8", both of which I had tried, and decided weren't appropriate for the application. A friend of mine at a local auto parts store managed to dig up some heater hose in the correct size, which worked out perfectly:
You'll have the cut the old plastic pipe to fit the new hose, because the new fitting is farther forward on the valve cover than the original:
Here's the 14mm hose installed with the new fitting and the cut pipe:
The only thing left to do is modify the smaller pipe(by cutting it) that goes to the back of the valve cover and attach it to the new fitting with the rubber adapter from the Jeep hose set:
And the finished product:
Really not a tough job. Took me about an hour. The hardest part was getting the old cover out and getting the new cover in.
PARTS LIST:
Used Valve cover from a '99 4.0L $10.00 Junkyard
PCV hose set $18.72 NAPA 715-1366
Valve Cover Gasket Set $46.84 FLAPS
PCV Fitting grommets $4.45/ea (2 required) Jeep 2946079
PCV hose set, rear ('97-) $11.85 Jeep 53030726
PCV fitting, rear, grey $6.10 Jeep 53030495
PCV fitting, front, black $4.60 Jeep 53030497
14mm I.D. hose - $0.00, FLAPS
