I've been having a funny noise coming from my passenger side of the engine. So today I took my rocker arms off to check for a bent pushrod or something.

I've never really messed with rockers much. Before I took them off, I felt them, and some I could wiggle a little bit, and some were tight and unmovable. Should they have been slightly loose, or tight? I'm assuming some of them weren't torqued properly.

Now that I'm putting them back on though, I've noticed that some of the nut things that hold the rockers on are shallow, and some are deep. I think there's 3 shallow ones, and 5 deep ones. Is it supposed to be like that? Only one of the rockers (the first one from the front of the engine) sits high enough to use one of the shallow ones though?? The other two shallow ones won't fit tight enough on any of the other rockers, because they're sitting too low.

What am I doing wrong here? I've got the GM 1.6 rr's btw, stock pushrods, and the hotcam springs.

 

You have to set the lash. You can't just screw the nuts down. It's normal for some to be tight/loose, because all the lifters are in various positions of up/down. When the lash is set on all rockers, the nuts will all be approximately in the same place.

Look in the "How To" section of my Tech Page for info on adjusting the valves (currently #9).

 

Yeah, but with the two shallow nuts that I have left, they won't even go on enough to set the lash. The nut will be all the way as far as it'll go onto the stud and the rocker will still be really loose. All the rest of the nuts that are deep I can get on right and set lash, etc... I just can't figure out what to do with these damn shallow ones. One of the rockers worked with a shallow one, but the other two...

 

Best thing to do is start over on all of them. I prefer the engine running method takes about 3 minutes per side.

 

Are there particular rockers that the shallow nuts should go on? I should have kept them in order when I took them off.

 

No, they can go in any order, the valve lash is the only thing that matters.

 

Ok...

but just out of curiosity, is there a reason why some are shallow and some are deep?

 

come on, it takes at least an hour to get valve cover off, loosen poly locks,adjust rockers, turn extra 1/4, tighten poly locks, run can again to double check for any tapping, double check poly locks after running, put valve covers back on. It took me about 3 min to type this , you got to be very fast to do it in 3 min