was I lucky ?

[Gunther]

Hi
I own a 68 convertible manual big block solid lifter.
Today, I visited a friend and while both of us looked at the engine, I thought , my hard would stop when I spotted a valve pushrod poking out of the R/H valve cover.
I fast took the cover off and realized, that the rocker nut came loose , the rocker turned around and freed the valve push rod .
It was the R/H front pistons inlet valve not opening anymore.
After all was put back to normal, and the engine was started, it smoked a lot for a while, I suspect engine oil got sucked into the pistons burning chamber during the intake stroke with the valve staying close.
It's all back to normal now.
Was I lucky or what ? The only thing left over, is the small hole in the R/H valve cover.
I guess, I better replace all 16 valve adjusting nuts.
Puh, Gunther

 

[resto75]

I think I would replace all the rockers also. The metal on the rocker itself is probably worn down which caused the slop to allow your rocker to move far enuff to let the push rod pass by it. I would at least check carefully for this. I had a similiar problem on a truck engine and it wasn't the nut, it was the rocker.

Roy

 

[Eric]

No fair, stuff like that is only supposed to happen when the speedo is somewhere in the blurred range :eek! Lucky break seeing it like you did.

 

[redmist]

I'll share a similar story....
I had just finished the complete rebuild and modification of my engine$$$. Except for the machining my son and I did the whole thing. As this was our first detroit iron job we were pretty shocked when it started and ran. After breaking in the cam (2000 rpm for 20 mins) we put the car away as we had open headers and I could hear my neighbors over the awesome sound.
The next day we fired it up with mufflers and we could hear a knock. It got louder as the rpm increased and blue smoke was starting come from the engine.
Needless to say we were pretty depressed.
I don't know why but I decided to take off the valve cover. Even though the heads were brand new from Edelbrock the rocker stud had worked it's way loose. The "knock" was the push rod wailing into the flapping rocker.
I reinstalled the stud (with major amounts of loctite) checked the others. The pushrod wasn't even bent!