This little breather pipe caused me a few headaches. I would have left it out if I had not known the consequences this would have. After all, all it does is return oil back into the sump right? This pipe runs from the air-oil separator on the side off the block. Any oil particles suspended in the air which is circulated by the crankcase ventilation system are supposed to drop out and run back into the sump while the fumes are drawn into the airfilter. The problem with leaving this pipe out is that because of the way the crank turns it flings oil up into the hole where the pipe was supposed to be from where it gets sucked into the airfilter where at best it makes one hell of a mess.
The way Fiat made this pipe it ends up coming out right on top of the diff when fitted to a Niva. To make things even more interesting , there is not much room between the bottom of the block and the top of the diff. Certainly not enough to allow the pipe to be bent around out of the way. So I had to find a way of rerouting it inside the block. This was made more difficult by the fact that there is not much room left once the crank starts spinning around. Then there is also the auxiliary shaft which turns the distributor and drives the fuel pump. This picture shows the original Fiat pipe with the crank and conrod in place.

As you can see there is not much room. I am going to reroute the pipe so it comes up on the left-hand side of the conrod instead of the right. This means that I am going to have to cut a piece out of the block where the left-hand bolt hole is. This next picture shows the start of the new pipe. Note how close it is to the auxiliary shaft, this is the fuel pump eccentric on the end of the shaft. This picture also shows clearer the bolt hole which is about to be cut away to make room for the pipe to come up (bottom RH corner).

This next two pictures show the new pipe completed. I added a bit of reinforcement to ensure it couldn't come adrift. The crank and conrod clear quite comfortably. A new hole was drilled and tapped in the bearing web to replaced the bolthole cut away.

Now it is time to cut the Fiat sump to fit around everything. This is the real fun part!