Engine Oil in the Air Filter

[SpeedRacerOnline]

- With all the expertise here, I thought I'd ask about this: I bought my '94 in June of 2010 and rode it as much as possible until late September. The only issue I had was having to replace the hard no-longer-sealing carb-to-riser boots after cleaning the mouse nest out of the air filter when I got it.

- That winter, unfortunately, it had to sit out in the snow as my apartments don't even have car ports and I didn't have a cover for it. When I got it ready to ride again in spring, 2011, it started and ran just fine and drove as good as always. However, after warming up and riding about 3-5 miles or so, I started noticing oil all over the place (particularly, hot oil burning my leg when I wore shorts around town). I found that it was pushing oil up through the air filter and it was pouring out of the air box. It was a lot of oil, too; enough to soak through my pant leg and stain my socks. I rode it several times in varying distances up to about 40 miles one-way, and it always did it every time. Fine at start, a couple miles later - oil everywhere, and kept blowing oil when stopped and idling until shut off. Replacing the oil was getting expensive, and I was worried about ruining the engine, so I parked it while trying to figure it out.

- I talked to several shops and got all kinds of guesses, but they all wanted me to pay them uber $$$/hr to check it out with the high possibility of nearly $1,000 in a rebuild by the time they got done with it. No way I could afford that; especially when I only paid $600 for the bike in the first place. Some of them said maybe the engine was going bad and had bad piston rings, but that didn't sound right to me as the engine ran perfectly. It still had plenty of power, got the same gas mileage, and would still hit 120mph. Since I couldn't find any answers and couldn't afford shop work, it got parked again.

- I got it back out again in 2012 when my friend offered me his garage to work on it in. When I tried to get it started again the battery was completely dead. I charged it for a bit and used jumper cables to get the bike running. It started up nice and ran smooth, but would die immediately if I touched the throttle. I think that problem was a bad battery, because when I shut it off it still wouldn't start without jumpers.

- What I found was really odd, though, was that the oil problem seemed to be mysteriously gone. I let the bike idle to warm up for awhile. Then, I put it in gear with the choke set high, and it had enough power to drive at idle. I took it out on the road, and was able to shift it up to third at idle, so I drove a couple miles just to see what it would do. The engine got good and hot, but it never did spit out any oil. I even hooked it back up to the jumper cables back at the garage so I could rev it up and it still didn't have the oil issue.

- Any ideas? This is the bike I'm hoping to start rebuilding when we move in June and hopefully have a garage, so I'd like to figure out what happened. With 25k miles on it, I'd like to overhaul the engine, but that prolly won't be in the budget for awhile. The only suggestion that ever made sense to me was maybe a plugged oil galley in the engine. I thought that might make it pump oil out of the wrong places, and maybe after sitting for over a year, the plug dried up enough to blow out when the engine was eventually restarted. Does that make sense, or does anybody have a better idea?