Thread: oil pressure

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As far as the oil pressure issue, oil is coming up to the lifters , but I would not consider it to be high oil pressure. I can run the engine with the valve covers off, with a piece of aluminum along the bottom edge of the head and high enough to divert oil back to the head. These heads were suppose to have been completely reworked and with around a 1,000 miles on the engine it's a little diturbing.

Originally posted by Deluga
As far as the oil pressure issue, oil is coming up to the lifters , but I would not consider it to be high oil pressure. I can run the engine with the valve covers off, with a piece of aluminum along the bottom edge of the head and high enough to divert oil back to the head. These heads were suppose to have been completely reworked and with around a 1,000 miles on the engine it's a little diturbing.

What does the gauge show?

You are supposed to be able to run the engine with the valve covers off and there isn't a lot of flow to the heads so it may look like you don't have much oil pressure.

The oil pressure gauge reads around 40lbs. After the engine heats up it drops to around 20lbs. With a high volume pumpI thought this was low. As far as oil at the heads, there is, I believe sufficient oil.

Originally posted by Deluga
The oil pressure gauge reads around 40lbs. After the engine heats up it drops to around 20lbs. With a high volume pumpI thought this was low. As far as oil at the heads, there is, I believe sufficient oil.

At what r.p.m.s. does it show 20 lbs. after it is warmed up?

also remember high volume does not mean hi-pressure and if it idles at 20lbs and cruises near 40 leave it alone. on the next build, if you want hi-performance oil system, leave pressure and volume stock and blue-print the pump.

Sometimes it is necessary to shim the oil pump due to rod,main,rod side to side clearence's etc. to obtain more oil pressure.

Regarding the problem of valve ticking, and now smoking oil out the pipe;

Based upon the existence of reasonable oil pressure I would not first be looking at the lifters as the cause of the valvetrain ticking. I would also not rule them completely out just yet either.

Since you have a relatively high lift cam I'd start by checking valve spring retainer to valve seal clearance. Valve ticking and oil out the pipe suggests to me that it may be beating valve seals. A seal, or seals, may not have been seated correctly, or you may have insufficient clearance between the seals and spring retainers.

If the seals and retainer clearances check out OK, then start looking at cam lobes and lifters as the cause of ticking, and intake gaskets and piston rings as the source of burning oil out the pipe.

Unfortunately, if you rule out the upper valvetrain as the cause and then need to go deeper I'd do a complete teardown and reassembly since the quality of the original build is unknown and then suspect.