Sorry, kinda long...

I cracked the block and shattered a piston on my old motor with nitrous..therefore i ended up buying a used 94 lt1 motor with 75,000 miles off ebay from a seller with lots of positive feedback...

i got the motor, had the heads ported and polished, and put in a 224/230 .546/.544 112lsa cam...high volume and high pressure oil pump, also had main and rod bearings installed...could only do the first set of cam bearings because the person who was putting the bearings in told me that to do the rest of them i'd have to take out the pistons and therefore need new piston rings which i couldn't afford at the time...

one thing i noticed with the ebay motor was that the connecting rods were different then from my old motor, and the #1 piston was different then the remaing 7...other than that the cylinders didn't have excessive wear on them...all the bearings that were replaced looked like they were in good condition...none of them had excessive damage...

after finally starting up the motor and running for about 15 min...the lifters were still not really pumping enough oil...car started at about 20-25psi oil pressure and after got hot only 5psi of oil pressure....( i thougt this was low, old motor on cold start up would be around 50 ...then 25 at idle after it warmed up)...anyway...i had the rocker arms tighetend down...and ran the car for about 25 min...noticed that even though motor was running and sounded strong oil pressure was decreasing to the point where it read -5psi...this was on a autometer electric gauge...so i hooked up a mechanical gauge that i knew worked right and still read the same amount...when you rev up the motor oil pressure increases very quickly and will jump to 50psi or so...then the lifters start pumping oil and oil gets all over the car...as far as at idle....they don't spray out and there is bearly any oil oozing out of the rocker arms...

other than that...the car souns strong and doesn't seem to be making any abnormal noises that i've noticed...and no it hasn't been tuned yet...just got it started up today...

i know low oil pressure will ruin a motor...but i'm not really sure what's wrong with the motor...am i missing something here?...the guy who installed the cam, rocker arms, springs, put all the bearings in, and assembled the entire motor has had a good 25 years of experience as far as putting motors together therefore i know he knows what he's doing...

any suggestions or ideas???...so far i've been recommended to take out the motor again...(note i've been carless for about 3months now...still in high school so i'm on a tight budget)...and do a complete rebuild...including all bearings, rings, pistons and rods...can't afford that...

thanks in advance for replying...sorry about the length

 

ttt