roller rockers on 302 heads

[nwander]

i have a 68 mustang with a 302 and i put 1.6 harland sharp roller rockers on it last year and it never ran right. as in broke down and have not had a chance to fix it yet. i put in new screw in studs and guid plates but when it was running the pushrods i got were not hard enough and wore on the guidplates and were not long enough or something because when i took it to a ford motorsports shop they said the valve train geomitry was off. i was just going to buy a new crate motor but turns out i'm real low on money and want to try to get it working as is. they said i would need to do machine work to the heads as in machine down the rocker arm stud mounts in order to fix the geomitry. this would cost $600. not worth it on stock cast iron heads.
my question is, can i get longer pushrods (hardend for guid plates) and still make it work. has anyone else done this. if so what did you do and what length pushrods work good.

please help

nicholas

 

[Loup-garou]

I've never considered running longer pushrods rather than milling down the rocker arm mounts.

A custom length set of hardened pushrods won't be cheap - and you should check with other machine shops... that price seems sky-high for the job that you requested.

 

[MitchGT]

first get an adjustable length pushrod (I got mine from summit racing). keep adjusting the pushrod length until the roller stays in the center of the valve(ie: it doesn't roll of the edge of the valve stem.check for articals on how to do it).Then use that measurement to buy hardened pushrods in the correct length( once again I bought mine from summit racing for about 110 bucks, hardened and custom length). It's possible that the heads might need machining, but try the cheaper route.