Reply to "My journey"

With the help of Chuck Banks and Ron Southern, we got the car running.

I drove the car for a couple tankfuls, noticed someticking, so I decided to check the valves.

With the valve covers off, I found evidence of more rockers failing.

The car was advertised, and I was told the had Jesel Rockers, which turned out not to be true.
The car had T&D rockers instead.

I packed the whole lot of them up and sent them in to T&D, and they were able to rebody my set, using what good parts were left, and I got away without spending too much money. T&D was great to deal with.

I had planned on replacing the valvesprings as well, bought a new set, but couldn't get them off without removing the head, and since I'm just trying to eek out enough life from this engine to last until I get to rebuilding it, I left the old springs in place. In trade, I'm keeping the RPM's down low, so I don't have anything funny happen due to old/soft springs.

I installed the rockers, torqued everything to spec, buttoned the car up. She fired right up, sounded good, but about a mile down the road, the motor dropped a hole completely. I chugged it home, thinking the worst.

When I removed the valve cover, I found a rocker shaft nut 1/4" from one of the oil drain holes (LUCKY), and found that the studs for the shafts were all loose. One had loosened, the pushrod fell over, no harm, no foul.

I took the whole valvetrain back off, tightened and locktited ALL the studs, and reinstalled the rockers.

This time around, the engine fired, sounded good, and stayed that way.

I even took a shot at adjusting my injection with my Unisync tool, but all the holes were within one number of each other, so I didn't make any adjustments.

I DID find that the whole linkage setup is EXTREMELY sensitive. The screws I did touch made big chaanges with tiny movements to the screws, so I put them back where they were.

Whatever I did, it actually made it run a bit better, better idle, and smoother down low.

I've now put a couple more tankfuls on the car, and it is performing perfectly (knocking on wood) and has more power than I can imagine!

I've only floored it a couple times, and WOW, the thing just pulls harder the higher it revs.

I let off at what I'd say is around 6000, high, but nothing too high, but it was starting to scare me with how hard it was pulling in 3rd.

I'm really happy to have my car back running. It runs well. It runs rich down low and at idle, and needs a tune, but it's running well enough for me to own and enjoy and drive it now.

In the future I'm going to look into getting the car tuned with the old electronics if at all possible.

Later in the future, the engine will be rebuilt and made new.