smoke from right when warmed up

[tagordon]

I am clueless... to say the least. I can not find the source of the smoke that appears on the right when the eng is warmed up. I can feel puffs in just one spot.
That being the top of the cylinder just inboard of the valve cover gasket.
But I can not see the source. Looked very carefully many times. I have considered video recording it & viewing it very slowly. As other than a shotgun strategy repair... I am clueless.
Thanks in advance for your reply.
Troy
81 R65RS

PS. Am I correct in believing that I should not be feeling any air puffs unless there is a prob w / rings & valve cover? Any help greatly appreciated.

[nhmaf]

I don't believe that you should be feeling "puffs" of smoke anywhere near there
under normal circumstances.    Um, are you certain that the spark plugs you
have installed are properly torqued (don't make them super tight either !!).
Maybe if you have a gasket based plug it isn't properly formed and isn't sealing
tightly ?   The valve cover/rocker arm area shouldn't be pressurized to any significant
degree unless maybe there was a problem with the crankcase breather system.   If that
were the case, and it were somewhat blocked, well, air pressure will try to get out
somewhere.  Maybe a video or photo indicating just where you notice this would help
with diagnosis, at the moment, I am largely speculating.  Do the puffs appear to be
related to the engine RPM (higher RPM = faster puffs).    Have you taken the sparkplugs
out to see if the one near the puff location is significantly different in color from the
one on the other cylinder ?

[Justin B.]

Yeah, I'd have to actually "see" that one as the only thing down in that area is the spark plug.  The only thing I could suggest would be taking out the plug and inspecting it or replacing it.  I had a Bosch Platinum plug seperate in an '86 Nissan pickup I had, talk about a racket!   I had to drive about 80 miles on three cylinders to get home .  I put an EZ-Out on a long extension and it came right out, the plug broke off right where the threaded part met the plug body.  The threaded portion was still in the head and the rest of the plug was hanging from the plug wire.  I thought about JB-Welding it back together to see if it would still work but then sanity set in.   Possibly something like this is starting to happen to one of your plugs?