i work for the marine corps and i wanna try and port my own heads, we have a motor t pool on my base and te ssgt said i could use the shop if i wanted. but i dont know what is involved, yet.

 

Go to the advanced section and do a search and you will find a good write up on porting heads...thats what i did. Also search on www.lt1tech.com i found the same writeup there also.

 

do you remember who posted it?

 

Do most people replace valves/lifters when they do heads/cam?

 

Valves... mostly when doing heads and cams guys arew swapping heads with new valves already included... as far as Lifters go... I guess it's a common sense thing and preventive at that... it is reccomended new lifters be installed with a new cam. Do most people do this??? Not sure... but the guy I know who didn't messed his engine up. Was it the lifters... probably not... but every little bit or precaution helps... and when you think about being that far down into your engine... and after goign through just that much trouble... you gotta ask... "hey" what the hell why not...

 

Funny, I just took my driver side valve cover off today to find one of the polylocks almost off the stud, with the pushrod nowhere in sight. I was going to take the intake off, but then upon closer inspection, the missing pushrod was found between the #5 and #7 cylinders, sitting on the inside of the block near the other pushrods. I was able to remove it with a magnet. Unbelievably, it was in perfect condition and there appeared to be no damage to other parts

Reassembled everything, adjusted a few valves, and defineatly retightned all the polylocks on that side to 20 ft-lbs.

 

Does anybody use thread locker on the Poly locks??? I used blue loctite... was I wrong for that? Jsut don't want any hting comming loose and ending up where it shouldn't be... can't afford that mistake.

 

I would imagine that would be fine if they are torqued right? If you had to get work done how easy would it be to get them off?

 

Back when I built the motor in '99, I used an allen wrench without a ratchet. This time I had an allen-ratchet type bit (from Sears) so I could use a torque wrench. Worked perfect.

 

well the blue type is the service removable version... When I first did it I adjusted the rockers wrongs... and when I went back to take the locks off a little Umph and they cameout fine...

 

Ah, the red stuff is the harder stuff?

 

Well, without going over all my woes again, let me just say that with less than 1000 miles on my new short block, my SA RRs (2 of them) came off the vavle stems. One of them knocked a keeper off and the valve dropped.

I hlave switched mechanics because this is the 2nd major mess I believe they are responsible ( the first one was a spun bearing with only 7000 on the engine. This time, I believe they just neglected to tighten the RRs after installing the heads on my new short block.

Preliminary analysis is that my bottom end may be ok. My new mechanic is in the process of getting things back together the way they should be done, including installing new stronger springs to support my little cam.

Probably cost me another couple of grand because of bad mechanics.

I'm a little gun shy about putting my SA RRs back on, but I paid dearly for them and I don't want to have to buy Non-SA rrs on top of that: hopefully SA RRs will work fine if they are adjusted and tightened correctly.

BTW, I don't know if this is an issue, but maybe the polylocks don't work as well as they should when installed on OEM studs which are generally not machined. Just read that somewhere a few years ago. Maybe they work just fine. This does point out, however, just how important it is to get those RRs adjusted correctly and "locked down". JMHO

 

Just thought of something else: probably the reason my keepers got knocked off and the valve dropped is because I had hardened pushrods. That is, even though the SA didn't call for Hardened rods, I bough them just the same. So maybe instead of bending, they were so strong that they just beat the hell out of the RRs until the RRs moved off the valve stem and continued to beat on the Retainers and locks eventually breaking the keepers. So maybe you were smart not to have hardened rods.

Just a guess.

 

Will your engine make any funny noises if you have a pushrod say, sitting inside the head not coming into contact with any others? My damn ticking noise is back and I had one pushrod bent and came off and it was making some very fast paced ticking noises. I just ****en hope its just the lifter get ticked because there is no pushrod on it.

 

That could very well be...but I won't be surprised if someone tells you to check your spark plugs/wires. A lot of them tick like that if one comes loose. It probably is your lifters, I had the same problem. How does one know their lifters are bent/damaged?