I have a hydraulic cam along with adjustable steel roller rockers (tip only). The rockers are not bushed. I am also using a brand new rocker arm shaft with bananna groves in them.

I've just installed the inner springs in my 360 engine, I ran only the single outer spring during the engine break-in per the instructions. The valve tip wear pattern is very good, centered dead on, which I'm happy to see because I spent some time making sure the rocker arm tips were aligned with the valve stem.

However...having had the engine running for only a total of 1 hr or so the shafts and the rocker arms show signs of galling/wear. I have great oil pressure (too much I think actually, about 20 PSI at idle and 55 PSI at about 3K RPM). Before starting the engine up I primed the oiling system, slowly turned the engine over and watched the oil flow out of the rocker arm shafts and onto the valve train to check and make sure that I had good oil flow up top.

Having pulled the shafts off for the valve spring upgrade I figured I'd check them out to see if everything was OK. Surprisingly I found the wear pattern on the rockers and the shafts. The rockers also appear to be somewhat bluish which indicates to me overheating most likely due to poor oil supply. I can't for the life of me figure out why though, the valvetrain appeared to be getting lots of oil and pressure appears to be fine. I'm now wondering if the volume of oil getting to the rockers shafts is just not big enough to keep the rocker arms lubricated.

Pushrods do not show any signs of wear, neither do the valve tips or the rocker arm rollers. So this has me a little stumped.

The cam is a Hughes 3844 piece, 238/244 dur @ 0.050", .535/.540 lift, springs are #1111 pieces, 150 lbs with valve closed and 320 lbs @ 0.550" lift.

Could be you overtightened the hold downs egging the shafts but also...Comp says NO open pressure above 340 lbs on their SS rockers and I think they have started bushing them after some trouble--Import China jobs may be the culprit as some I have seen had no groove inside the rocker to get oil all way around--but with grooved shafts?? I bet they are Cats maybe? I have used a ton of the Cat H beam rods and am lucky I guess but the rockers they sell usually die before you can throw the box they came in out in the trash--folks on here think that it is a good idea to leave the rockers in the box before you do that--Sorry for your trouble man really--don't mean to make light of it--get some good rockers and you'll be fine--Marsh Performance 336 752 2879 sells some very good bushed sets shafts, billet hold downs and all for about $325 range Good Luck

(1) reprime it w your drill and hit the 2 sweet spots and see if both sides are NOW getting alot of flow (at each pair) (2) check that the small 15 degree offset (from vertical) oiling holes are on the bottom and offset slightly toward the valve side. (3) not likely that you'd need to remove the shaft end plugs to check for trash plugging it as (1) will take care of that potential prob

were the shafts installed correctly?

I agree with a few replies above. You need to have the shafts indexed so the oiling holes properly oil the rockers.

I bought the rocker arms used, but they were in excellent shape and had no galling/wear signs. Not sure who the maker of these is, but here is a picture of what they look like :





I installed the shafts correctly, with the rocker arm oiling hole/bananna grove offset towards the rocker arm 'saddle', where the greatest friction occurs between the rocker arm and the shaft. I actually checked this twice: first by physically making sure the oiling passage was offset towards the valve (correct side of the hold-down bolt), then by making sure that the shaft markings were pointing the right way (driver side to the front of the engine, pass side to the rear).

The oil pressure I showed is with a hot engine, I was going with the 10 PSI/1000 RPM rule...when cold the pressure pegs the gauge to about 80 PSI.

With the shafts off I tried to see if the oil passage feeding the assembly was free of obstructions...problem is that it connects to the head bolt passage and with the headbolt in place you can't get anything past there...well, anything big enough to really tell if the head gasket isn't somehow blocking something. When I was assembling the engine I made sure that the head gasket was not blocking any passages by comparing the deck layout to the head layout...all was good, but maybe I made a mistake somewhere?

For now, I put both the assemblies back on. I will go through the oil prime again, hit the sweet spot as RapidRobert suggested and will make sure that there is enough lube getting to the rockers. Visually though it's hard to estimate if there is enough oil there...I definitely had oil when I checked before engine start...but how do I tell if the volume is large enough?

With the drill prime I was getting the oil pressure to about 60 PSI...so I'm thinking that should be feeding enough volume at relatively low RPM (drill is about 1600 RPM), sort of equivalent of seeing what the engine is going through just a tad off idle.

Thanks for the suggestions guys, I will do the oil prime again and report back.

With the good oil flow when priming that you stated and your orientation is correct there is not much, if any, chance of it being an oil flow problem, It will only flow more with the engine running.

What about the shafts? Are they hardened or hard chrome plated? Stock hyd shafts (even with grooves) might not be up to the wear that the rockers are putting on them.

My friend had the same problem with the old comp stainless (unbushed) rockers. He was told they needed to be honed for additional clearance.
I think the bronze bushings in the rockers is the real fix?

Someone on here a few years ago had a set of Cats(i think). When the hold downs were torqued to the proper value, the shafts distorted.

Exactly which ones are galled? Which one are blue and where? Do you have pic of the galling? You put it back together with the rocker/shaft galled? How much side clearance?

you wanna have the oiling holes point down and towards the valve springs.

If you had the old bushed MP rockers you could get away, well what I mean to say is..the bushings have double banna grooves and depending what shafts, so would they.

I could go outside and look but I'm stuck in bed sick, so I'll ask.
do all shafts have one enlarged hold down hole for the oil?
OR are they all like the mp shafts with all holes enlarged?

Does not sound like galling. Galling is when there is a transfer of metal - like cold welding. Getting the rockers off the shaft would be difficult. There would be obvious rough surfaces where the metal transfered.

The shafts can become egg shaped on the four end hold downs esp. with stock hold downs when over torqued. This will cause galling, overheating and welding the rocker to the shaft. Lots blue. If the side clearance is too tight, there will not be enough enough oil flow past the rockers, causing them to overheat. It does not sound like you have any of these problems. Sounds more like dirt from oil passage or shafts.

I would dull the edges of the grooves on the shafts, looks to have sharp edges on the banana grooves.

jmo

Went through my old Comp Cams catalog and indeed, these are the older Magnum Roller rockers, part # 1420-16. Originally these would have been bundled with rocker arm shafts as well...not sure if those would have had a different oiling hole/grove configuration though. Googling the part number around brings up old links which indicate that the original shafts may NOT have been grooved at all.