I'll be very curious about this.
Yes, me too. I have been puzzling about the cause for a good long time and finally decided to pull the trigger and dig in. Just before I did it, I pulled the valve cover oil cap to test for that same smoke coming out there, and there was nothing. I guess I could run a compression test as well, but I do not believe it would determine anything. And for that reason, I will also post back when I reach a conclusion, good or bad.
And while I was in there: I was going to post up pictures, but my computer decided not to read the sd card from my camera
. But it showed that having been fed a regular diet of good oil at 10k intervals, the cam lobes showed very little wear (just a little bright spot just below the tip on the leading edge) and the lifters had a small circle (about 1 cm diameter) in the center where a slight amount of wear was evident. The cam chamfers looked new in width the entire circumference of each lobe. The valve stems had very little movement in the guides - hardly worth trying to measure. I felt good about just doing the seals and nothing else. And since I wiped everything off, I added some assembly lube to the cam and lifters when I put it all back together.
It was interesting, and hopefully it won't be repeated on this engine for a long, long time.