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Reply to "New heads, new intake, new rockers, new pushrods - Very noisy valves and very little oil through pushrods"

You are stating a new issue here that (I have to review your previous posts) I haven't heard before.

Pistons hitting the heads are caused by to high of a piston height. From memory, you need a minimum of .020" clearance between the top of the piston and the cylinder head surface.

Sure, that gets checked with clay and then adjusted with head gasket thicknesses. There is a selection of head gaskets available that will fix the issue.

The only "problem" with thickening the head gasket is you are reducing the nominal compression ratio.

Unless you are building an all out race engine, that's not an issue.

You are at most dropping the actual c/r .5.



All manufacturers use an "advertised" compression ratio and I know of NO engines that actually measure what they are advertised at.

An advertised (from Ford) 351 with a 10.5:1 will never measure out to that. It's more like 9.8:1. Now in the "olden days" right after Noah's Arch landed from the flood, we used "shim head gaskets" (thinner then stock) to raised the c/r about .5. That is provided you had the .020" clearance between the pistons and heads. That's how much the connecting rods stretch while running.



I just did this on my 347 with AFR heads. We had to shave the heads .025" to get the chambers to 54cc's and use a thin head gasket. That resulted in this case with a .023" clearance (few...close but clear!) and an actual measure 9.8:1 so that's good with pump premium.



I still have some clay. Want some? You can actually do it with a feeler gauge measuring how far down in the hole the piston is.

Last edited by panteradoug
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