Reply to "oil drainback hoses"

The pan is cad plated gold. If I weld on it, will need to refinish the pan. Trying to save one step but am toying with welding on the bungs and just sending the pan to the powder coater?

As far as how many drain back locations to have...I think this all started with the publication way back in '69 of the Boss 302 racing preparation booklets that Ford published.

They recommended the fittings in the valve covers. If you follow the discussions on the 351c web page, a suggestion was made to put the fitting in the heads instead, right over the head drain back holes.

A couple of thoughts come up to me as a result. 1) when NASCAR went to the 5.7 limit on engines in the '70s, the Ford racers of course moved to the 351c engine as the next best thing to a 429 shotgun. That engine immediately started to suffer from valve spring failure.

Eventually the fix for that was to make the oil puddle or flood the head with a lake of oil to submerge the valve springs in oil to cool them, and the problem stopped.

That was with the iron head. I am running aluminum A3 heads. If you look closely at those heads, you will see that the valve cover rails on them have been increased over the production iron counterparts? That I am pretty sure is for this oil bath thing? Do I want to reduce that lake of oil under racing conditions with the drain back holes?

2)there is no talk of check valves in these hose assemblies to keep oil in the pan from backing up back into the covers under cornering loads of racing? Do I need those? I wonder?

Well that's where I am at, and all this talk of race prepping a 351c for flat out rpm is timely for me so I thought I'd bring this all up here now.

Actually I'd like to see pictures of what others have done and hear what others think about the importance of these items and the problems that occurred as a result and such.

For instance, never hear of anyone talking about using a main girdle on a D2CA block? Any opinions on that?