Head Gasket Trouble - Pull Engine

I really like this lesson on Geometry. I bolded the last sentence because nobody ever told me this, they just say $hit like "tighten them all the way down and forget it". Hate it when they don't explain why, you don't learn without the explanation. To me this is the crucial step in helping others on these forums and without explanation with your opinions you might as well not even post at all.

Tags: check pushrod length, pushrod check tool, valvetrain geometry, factory rocker arms

Geometry Lesson

All pushrod engines that pivot a rocker arm on a stud determine the location of the rocker-arm tip relative to the valve tip with pushrod length. The small-block Chevy, along with many other production engines, originally came equipped with stamped-steel rocker arms. These rockers used a very wide rocker tip with a very gentle radius that was extremely forgiving when it came to pushrod length. The pushrod length could be short or long and the broad rocker-arm tip would accommodate it.

Read more: Setting Pushrods Length, Quick and Easy- Car Craft Magazine
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I gotta tell ya, I'm pretty excited. Money situation sucks but I will make it. Horsepower though, adding aluminum heads and upgraded intake with 70mm TB is going to be awesome.

Like my signature line says, not many mods but the S/C and other small mods added 60 extra pony's or so when bolted on. Went from 225 to 280-285hp on the dyno 2 years ago. No tune either, just a timing retard box from MSD.

So let's say conservatively that new heads will add 50 more hp and intake add 30hp I'm looking at a possible total of 360-365hp.

At 19lbs/hr my new bottleneck is going to be stock fuel injectors I think. I believe they are rated(N/A) at 285hp so I am going to be pushing their limits, hell I guess I was pushing their limits before I make these upgrades...

These are my thoughts on what I will need soon. I'm thinking 42-46lb/hr injectors based on the following. I don't plan on going more than 400hp anytime soon. Maybe 450 tops.

Woah, that would be cool. I am assuming your talking about adding the upgraded injectors for those numbers?

I am currently running a BBK 255lph in tank fuel pump.

A5literMan said:

Yes on the injectors! Lol. You have enough fuel pump. Just get the matching MAF and injectors with a tune and you'll have those numbers easy. With the FMU/19's you won't see much more power than you had before. Pushing the injectors that hard is asking for problems, again.(like going lean and blowing a head gasket) I know you've spent a lot of time and money so far but don't stop at this point. You've ran a marathon don't trip over the finish line. Lol.

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Chuckman said:

a 42lb injector is fairly common on stockish boosted engines. your pump, as long as the filters are clean, should be fine with them. get a tune with injectors that size, you dont want to risk washing you're cylinders out with fuel on startup, 42's are about on that edge where theyre too big for ecu to control with a 19lb calibration on startup.

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I'm definitely going to check this out. Definitely want a chip to tune with. These upgrades will be next.

Updates.

I decided on heads and intake. Many of you may not enjoy this post but I made my decisions based on what was best for my situation.

I went with my local shop heads and bought the Latemodelresto SVE intake with 70mm TB.

Heads are a reman of the ford racing gt40X. Intake is a reman of the edelbrock performer series.

Flo-Tek Heads

• 180cc intake runners
• 62cc exhaust runners
• 1.94" intake and 1.54" swirl-polished exhaust valves
• 58cc chambers
• Performance valve springs (.550 lift)
• 115 lbs. spring seat pressure
• Compatible with most flat tappet camshafts
• Hardened locks and retainers
• PC seals
• High-temp exhaust seats
• Multi angle valve job
• Bronze guides
• 3/8" rocker studs and guide plates

Head Flow Specs:

Lift Intake Exhaust
.400 209 137
.500 223 161
.600 248 191

Application

• Recommended Spark Plug: AGSF-32C
• Valve Spring Type: Single w/ Damper
• Valve Spring Application: Hydraulic & Solid Flat Tappet
• Valve Spring Diameter: 1.465" O.D.
• Valve Spring Seat PRessure: 115 lbs.
• Valve Spring Rate: 280 lbs/in.
• Intake Valve: 1.94"
• Exhaust Valve: 1.54"
• Valve Type: Stainless, Swirl-Polished
• Air Flow Data:
  • Intake
    • 223 CFM @ .500"
    • 248 CFM @ .600"
  • Exhaust
    • 161 CFM @ .500"
    • 191 CFM @ .600"

So I plan on keeping up with my thread. I will keep updates over the years on their durability and performance. Eventually they will be port matched but for now they will just be bolted on for time sake. I'm moving to Texas!

Well like my whole thread mentions, I had to tear it down to make sure I didn't have a cracked block. So I only wanted to rebuild the motor as stock to keep cost down. The intention was to simply get it up and running again. No plans for upgrades this go-around.

Ran into problems along the way with my stock heads I planned to reuse. Had to ditch them. I already had found a worn out clutch that had to be replaced which set me back. Now heads AND a intake really set me back. Just a snowball effect of money. The main thing though was I knew it was a good car and I was determined to keep it part of my plan to be my backup vehicle to my truck. Especially moving somewhere I have no friends or family for help.

I'm running stock cam so the springs should be just fine. Also, because they are local to me and I have used them several times before for machine work I got to know the assembler of the heads and he took care of me. After getting to know my car, finding out it had a blower, he adjusted the spring height for me to help with cam and blower combo.

The heads are made from the same manufacturer that other reputable US car manufacturers have their heads cast from. So I'm told. Let's just hope I'm correct and these parts are not as cheap anymore like our grandfather's used to teach us. How many parts on all these vehicles being produced today use Chinese castings? My guess is quite a few.

This will be a good chance for me to report on them over the years though so we get a true idea of how well the Chinese parts have progressed over the years.

On with my progress.

The new heads came in. Looked pretty good out of the box except for a couple minor issues. First I noticed the face for the valve cover had been dented a little like something feel on it from the outside edge or it was dropped but couldn't have been from to far because the damage was minor. Second I noticed one of the freeze plugs wasn't flush but it was a little cocked inside it's hole.

Tri-State Cylinder Head/Flo-tek was more than happy to fix these issues and they did it right away so I got to watch. We tale about my setup on the phone previously and they wanted me to bring the heads in anyways to adjust the spring height for my blower. Even though I was only using stock cam he thought it would be best.

I got them to the garage along with my newly purchased 1.6 ratio fordracing roller rockers(thanks to another stangnet member) and a comp Cams high tech adjustable pushrod I started working to find the proper pushrod height.

Tri-State told me most of the time you can retain your stock pushrod height but in my case I found I needed 6.010 in pushrods. I was reusing felpro 9333(already compressed) head gaskets as the where the same thickness as the new head gaskets I would be using, felpro 1011-2, compressed thickness of .039 in.

I was a little worried about how short they were so I fired up another stangnet thread on them and talked to summit tech support, and of course the engine builder at speedway motors. Speedway guy tells me (as did tri-state) I'm doing it correctly and they typically don't see this from most of their customers who normally don't even check them, they just buy stock height hardened pushrods and install. This surprised me but nonetheless I trusted my judgement and it turned out 6.010 put my roller rocker tips perfectly aligned in the middle of my valve stems for even pressure, even wear, longer valvetrain life, and possibly added horsepower in conjuction with proper valve lash set and geometry. We shall see.









Comp Cams pushrod checker, each turn is exactly .050in making it super easy to determine length.




Here you can't see very well but the roller tip of rocker arm was perfectly in the center of valve stem using the dry erase marker.






AND the big test, NO P2V CLEARANCE ISSUES!




This just goes to show, the local engine builder did NOT give good advise when telling me I should be fine to go ahead and bolt on the stock heads because with stock cam I was nowhere near any problem thresholds after milling the heads. He said the heads could be milled up to .080 before you start to see issues. Then he tells me if there was a problem it must be a bad timing chain(which sure, synchronization issue could have made problems for p2v) but you should NEVER tell a rookie like me to go ahead and bolt on the heads and not worry about it! Especially a rookie like me who learns every little detail he can and finds out your giving bull$hit advice. Hes getting a bad review on his Facebook page from me needless to say.

SVE upper and lower intake from latemodelresto. Interesting though it says procomp on the box.

I'm mocking up the fit between my new heads and lower intake. The fit wasn't perfect but will have to do for now. I wanted to grab the die grinder for a quick port match real bad...








New tall valve covers came in too.

If there's one thing I've learned it's that there's way too many options for all manufacturers to have everything covered when it comes to parts that bolt up to one another but when you build a part, such as a cylinder head and you build one in such a way it fits more than one engine, and you've put bigger holes in to make it so, it might be nice to tell your resellers to include this valuable information... My two cents.

I was pretty ticked off when I talked to both the manufacturers and the resellers of the flo-tek heads only to find out after they arrived, and due to my insane amount of research(in this case 3 days too late) that the bolt holes need these little babies when you bolt them onto a sbf 302.




These little suckers cost me a whole extra weekend of lost time getting everything put back together. Of course if I weren't on a timeline i would not have given a crap...

Pretty nice pieces I found, Trick Flow Head Bolt Bushings TFS-51400419

You can see their beveled insides just as the ARP head bolt washers come with. I made sure to oil these before inserting bolts.






Instructions for flo-tek said 80 ft-lbs long bolts, 75 ft-lbs short bolts. Now I already used the ARP thread lube supplied while I was mocking up the heads and working with rocker arms so they had been lubed, the lowers I left the the leftover lube on them and just added a little sealer at the bottom.

liljoe07 said:

There is a lot more to rocker geometry than being centered on the valve stem. And being centered, doesn't equal all those things you mentioned. It would be nice if that was the case, but with so many mixtures of parts from different manufacturers, and so many tolerances, it's not that common. So don't automatically assume your geometry is correct just because the mark is centered.

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You got me to thinking more on VTG. Reading this article really helped.

Rocker Arm & Valve Train Geometry - Circle Track Magazine

I will admit I was focused on getting the roller tip sweep path centered on the valve stem.

I made another post on this to ask what others thought about my findings. Flo-tek engineers were telling me most could keep their original length pushrods but in my case, using the adjustable pushrod I doing that I actually dropped from the factory length of 6.275 down to 6.050 to get the roller tip centered.

Most were telling me usually when upgrading to aftermarket aluminum heads your pushrod length usually INCREASES not decreases. But when I talked to the reseller he mentioned I was doing the right thing by finding the right pushrod length and that most don't do this they just buy the resellers suggested pushrod and bolt them on without checking.

Now I'm starting to wonder who has the correct geometry, me who centered the roller on the valve, or the guy who just bought suggested parts and slapped them together.... After reading that article I'm wondering if the suggested part is only the 6.275 length pushrods then I may be the one with bad VTG...

What I will say is this.

The rocker arms suggested for this head were these: Speedway Small Block Ford Roller Rocker Arms, 1.6:1, 3/8 Stud - Speedway Motors, America's Oldest Speed Shop

What I ended up buying were these: http://m.summitracing.com/parts/fms-m-6564-a351?ibanner=MobileSwitchTablet

I'm pretty sure their suggested rockers were just knock offs of the ford racing M-6564-A351 that I bought.

I didn't have any problems with the head studs when installing them such as running out of threads due to bad VTG with the new 6.050 in. pushrods I used.

I wonder, after getting everything installed and running is it still possible and what would it take to check for correct VTG? I would like to discuss this more for sure!

More progress notes:

So in light of my previous post I'm going to continue with my progress, even thought my VTG may not be correct so hang in there with me and maybe we will learn something cool afterwards.

Picking up where I left off last time I had used a nifty comp cams pushrod checker tool that basically acts as a micrometer to every full turn off the adjustable cap it equals .050 inch of travel/adjustment. This got me to a pushrod length of 6.050 which ended up being shorter than the stock length of 6.275 in. I was under the impression at the time to find correct VTG meant you simply pick your head, valves, springs, and rocker arms, use a checker tool to get your roller tips centered on the valve stem and boom, you got correct size pushrod and therefore will have correct VTG. Looks like I was wrong, but let's hope that I'm not to far off after all. More on this later.

I went with Manley hardened pushrods. 6.050 in. They have a good reputation and I did learn this is one part you don't want to LOSE weight on to lighten your load. Manleyer the better haha






At first I took this little note on "clear oil passages" lightly but after I saw one of them caked full of grit I ended up taking a little wire and bending it ever so slightly and running it back and fourth through the pushrod to clean them all out. Several of them were not clear.




Rockers and pushrods installed. Notice my new ARP studs I got for my new valve covers. They are sweet, makes me wish I sprung for the ARP head studs too.



Valve covers installed.