Smoked pushrods cups and actual valve tip damage...what da?!

...not a race package, just my weekend driver, still, it hurts me to see parts damaged, grrh...!!!

Anyways, OK, so half-way through last cruising season I decided to try out my Crane ductile iron 1.6 ratio rocker arms on my SB motor (360)...I measured the correct pushrod length, got me some Smith Bros stuff, beauties.

I assembled everything, the Cranes replacing my CompCams Mangun SS roller rockers (1420-16, 1.5 ratio).

Combo seemed to work great, no issues that I was aware of.

Alright...so the warm weather has finally arrived mid-west here, I pulled the valve covers off, pulled the rockers out, I wanted to have a look at the rocker nose to valve tip pattern...to my HORROR I actually found 2 separate valves with a visible amount of metal from the tip actually gone...I will post pics tomorrow, today I was far too "traumatized" by the darn experience...LOL!

The rocker arms are fine, but the valve tip has about 0.5 mm of metal gone in just a half of the tip, towards the exhaust. Worse yet, the pushrods cup ends have that tell-tale heat discoloration markings, and I'm looking at the two and concluding there was some seriously bad stuff with lack of oil/lubrication going on.

Strangely though all but these 2 valves are fine, although the rocker shafts themselves show similar blueing.

I am somewhat stumped, because I know I have always had good oil flow up to the top. I suspect at the moment that the oil lubrication holes in the Crane rockers are badly insufficient.

There are two:
1) top of the rocker arm
2) back-side, leading through the pushrod adjuster screw

#1 is supposed to provide lubrication to the valve tip through gravity feed I suppose, while #2 is supposed to provide cup/screw lubrication through gravity feed as well.

Anyways, I have a set of valve tip lash-caps handy. I will use them to cover up the tip damage. I know this is at best a real ugly fix, but this motor is all factory iron, way past it's age, and so pulling the heads to replace the two valves just makes no sense. This will require me to re-check the pushrods length, etc, etc...but I think I need to do something about the oiling holes in the rocker arms.

I seem to remember a thread a while back on this very topic...I searched high and low, nothing came up...went the "Internet wide/Google search engine" approach, did not find anything either...can anyone point me to this? That post talked about specific location where the additional oil passage should be drilled and which of the current two should be closed with a set-screw (I think...).

Thanks!

The number 2 hole isn't gravity fed. It gets full pressure when the valve is closed.

Don't know about the Crane ductile rockers but some of the gold W-2 rockers had the oil hole relocated to fix Chrysler's miss job with the oil holes in the shaft. With the valve closed, you should be able to stick a piece of wire through the rocker and into the shaft.

The hole in the rocker probably doesn't line up,with the hole in the shaft.

I'm pretty confident my suggestion will fall upon deaf ears........ But............ I'd just put back on the stuff that was working before and not worry about the 5-10hp you might be losing.

What rocker shafts are you using, do they have 'banana' grooves or just oiling holes ? In my experience non banana shafts will turn pushrods and other parts blue every time.

Well...you are absolutely right, on both accounts.

The fact that things got screwed up has me so pissed off that I am adamant about fixing the problem. I am always painfully slow in making changes just to make sure I did not miss any steps or miss-calculated something, so on a personal level this bugs the [censored] out of me. If anything maybe there is a "lesson learned" somewhere in there? lol

In the end though, I may very well go back to the working combo...I literally just want to get an extra season of cruising out of this combo.

I used a set of MP rocker shafts that I bought as part of the MP P4876343 W2 rocker arm set.

Now, these were non-offset, I measured this out, it was one of the first things I did. The shafts only had the oiling holes, I wanted to put the banana groves on them, so I did.

I replicated what my Hughes Engines banana shafts looked like (this is what I'm using on the 1.5 roller rockers), including the width of the banana grove itself. I then removed the end-plugs, cleaned them up, re-installed (new) plugs. Maybe this is causing the problem? I do not see how though, all rocker arm pairs have between 0.005-0.010 side clearance, nothing bigger than that.

One of my Mopar books shows the recommended oiling hole setup for these ductile iron rocker arms. They clearly show that there should be a direct feed onto the rocker arm nose/valve tip. Basically a hole drilled right below the rocker arm nose.


I will double check this. The positioning of the oiling holes in the shaft is such that most of the oil initially comes "out" towards the bottom of the rocker, in the highest pressure area I suppose? Whatever is dumped out of the shaft then travels up and around the rocker arm through a channel that is machined on the inside of the rocker arm body.

At least when I assembled this I did run the engine and confirmed by looking through the oil cap hole in the valve covers that the oil was in fact being "squirted" out of the top of the rocker arm oiling hole. I took that to mean that I had a positive confirmation the shaft to rocker arm oiling passages were working as expected.

I will take some photos today to illustrate all of this.

I don't recall ever using the 1.6's on a SB, but I've used the 1.5's several times........... Just used std shafts, no additional prep......... Never a problem.

I can say I never had issues with non offset rockers.,I only had issues with W-2 stuff. AFAIK (and I have a brand new set of shafts, stands and 1.6 rockers in the shop right now) Chrysler sent all the W-2 stuff out with the oiling holes in the T/A offset and height.

Like I said, it possible Crane moved the holes for some reason.

The W-2/5 stuff was a nightmare to oil until in relocated the holes.

Check for coil bind.

when you installed these. did you use motor oil or assembly lube?

A few years ago I asked Ray Barton and I think you also (Dwayne) about upping the rocker ratio for more lift. Both of you said the increase wasn't worth the possible problems versus the reward!

I did listen to my engine builder(Ray B.) and head porter.(Dwayne)

The moral of the story is if it's working why mess with it?

Second moral, which I have done is, lessons can be expensive, some cost more than others.

Don

Are both burnt push rods and valves on the same cylinder? What cylinder?

Just motor oil, straight 30.

Yes, well, consider that if we all were to take precisely that approach we would still be doing the very same thing that previous generations and generations before them did...LOL, so not trying to be a smart-ass about this, but I made it a point to move to a 1.6 ratio rocker arm to evaluate the difference that made (if any???) on a street car, having kept all other parameters the same...really, an attempt on my part to learn stuff.

Your 2nd point is well taken though...sometimes these lessons get expensive. I am glad I caught this as part of a routine "check before run" I do at the start of every cruising season.

On mine I soldered shut the OE holes in the side of the shaft (kept the OE bottom ones) & redrilled thru the rocker (.100") & on thru the shaft on the valve tip side and thru the shaft on the pushrod side (the rocker already has a hole on that side then I brazed shut the hole in the top & plugged the large access hole in the rocker on the pushrod side that is already there & I drill the new ones with the cam on base circle so there is some dwell time for a good flow.

As have I Dwayne. This is really a lot of trouble in my opinion, for a result that has been settled for over 40-50 years.....there is nothing new here, and thinking you are stretching the limits of engineering, well, thats just a pretty sad argument.You can argue a cam " designed" to take advantage of the 1.6 ratio might be a faster, more powerful combo.COULD you combo gain from the swap? Maybe, but in reality, who cares. Your going to gain nothing with 5HP in a street car.If you put it into coil bind, then you've done more damage. I would suggest making your time more useful, ( and fun) and put the old combo together, and go enjoy your car!

If you decide to take up stock eliminator or class racing, then you can break this stuff back out and then it will matter, but for now, I doubt its gonna be a beneficial use of time. Good luck.

Thanks for the feedback and input guys.

I do not recognize the alias names, ie. I have no idea "who is who" in our hobby/business, although I bet some of you make a living helping guys like me either get out of a problem spot, or avoid one altogether.

Still, I can't help but feel like some of the feedback just seems gloomy and downward pessimistic, as in '...duh, buddy, don't be a shmuck, stick to what works...', LOL, seriously, sorry no looking to bite the hand that feeds, just being blunt.

Look, you're not replying to someones who's built 10 different motors, all different combos, etc, etc. I am a hobby guy, I try to learn from what I do and sometimes - yes - those changes will push the boundry of what I deem to be "stretching the limits of engineering". Not quite sure what makes that desire to learn a "sad argument" CompWedgeEngines??? Remember, my limits of engineering are within the weekend-driver framework...very, very different from those of you who race these things.

For what it's worth, when I made this switch the motor did seem to wake up. The throttle was more responsive, the overall butt-meter seemed to suggest it pulled better. That is in a 360 motor, 10.5:1 static CR, Hughes Engine HE3844AL hydraulic flat tappet cam, 108 LSA, 238/244@0.050", .535/.540 lift @ 1.5 and .571/.576 @ 1.6 ratio. There absolutely was a different sound to the motor, especially @ idle, which is weird because I did not expect this at all. Having had some past cam change experience I would actually compare this to something along the lines of going to a step hotter cam.

I thought it was interesting to see this difference.

Anyways, appreciate the feedback regardless, all your points are noted. I will go back to check the coil-bind per mr2performance's suggestion, I did verify I had room before installing the 1.6 rockers.

Did you do the rocker ratio swap independant of the additional head porting ?

Before I got too carried away, I'd break out the priming tool and see what kind of flow from the rockers is actually coming out, and where it's going......especially the ones that had the issues.

Rapid Robert....do you have the angles of the oil holes in the shafts relative to the bolt holes?
and clean your PM box! LOL

OK, got some pics to hopefully help answer some of the questions.

1) here is the full rocker arm shaft, stripped of the rocker arms, showing the home-made banana groves


I removed all the rocker arms off of my roller setup as well and compared the shafts side by side. Exactly the same configuration, oil passage holed drilled in the same spots, etc, etc. Is that maybe part of my problem? I do not actually have a factory (340 TA???) shaft handy to compare these to, and if the ductile iron rockers are supposed to be fed somewhat differently that maybe be part of my root cause?

2) this section shows the shaft blueing I mentioned, I think this is heat, yes?


3) finally here is a close-up of a couple of rocker arms, you can see that the direct oiling hole is right smack in the middle of the oiling grove that is machined on the inside of the rocker arm body, this I would expect should feed enough oil to the top oiling hole as well as the pushrod cup hole


I decided to modify the rocker arms to close up the top oiling hole and will drill a separate oil hole to squirt oil into the rocker arm nose as well as a into the pushrod cup. This happens to match the configuration I see on my CompCams rollers and the stuff my MP Engines book shows.

Just to clarify, we are looking at the bottom of those rocker shafts? IIRC those holes should be on the bottom facing the intake?

I dont have the angles & it varies significantly. I would do each one individually. what I did is dykem paint the shaft. On the bench, drilled the rocker on the valve side (right side of pic). On the eng, mockup/located each rocker/pair of rockers horizontally with shaft circular shims and or slight deburring of the holddowns to get .015 side clearance per pair (iirc) with the rocker contact area centered on the valve tips. made a circular mark in the dykem on the shaft thru the rocker with a thin scribe & drill that hole(s) in the shaft(s). On the pushrod side with adjusters out, the rocker is already drilled (confirm its dia) & just scribe thru to the shaft the same way then drill the hole(s) in the shaft on that side also. deburr the holes of course & braze/plug the top/outer side hole(s), the OE outer side hole on the pushrod side. just have the pushrods out & have the rocker contacting the valve to duplicate base circle for the proper clocking. I cleaned out 33 PM's! EDIT I don't think I missed anything I did but it was a time consuming deal.

Some other options...

Edit.. I wrote this before turning off my filter and seeing the pics you posted.

Ever thought of using std shafts and put a small groove on the inside diameter that would allow full 360 oiling full time to all the oil holes, like the 90s comp pro mag rockers, ive had them live with a .580 solid and #440 open.

As well vs plugging and relocating holes the china man has mastered the the engineering of 1.6 rockers that live. After a full season on a near .700 lift solid with K motion K800 springs, now on my truck with oem heads ive just at 4k miles on them with a street hydro roller without a glitch. There are simple bolt on and go 1.6-s in the marketplace.

Its very admirable trying to sort this out, id ask if you have a spare motor you could mock these up on and prime as mentioned while you do sort it out.

No one is saying you should not sort this out if thats your wish, but does you current build have the be the lamb that might get slaughtered when again a spare 318 in the corner and a primer rod could do the same, so it seems?

Its June, you could always run your last setup and sort this out over the winter.

Nothing sucks worse then a nice street ride sitting while others are cruising.

Lastly for no more then the 1.6 will net on your combo if you want a bit more edge from time to time, toss a 150 shot plate kit on it.

Please dont mis understand, we all like to do things differently and go off the path, I do and some have worked great but I also have a shelf full of nice looking parts that are so jacked they are best left on the shelf to look at.

If you are running head studs, did you open up the head bolt hole(s) where the oil comes up from the cam to the rocker shafts?
I usually also make the lower rocker shaft hole where the oil feeds into the shaft slightly larger too.
With the regular shafts, oil should flow around the hold down bolts no problem.
On my 360, I also grooved the #2 & #4 cam journals (small groove) so the rockers get some oil all the time.
On my big block T&D rockers they use a smaller diameter thick wall rocker shaft, and the hold down bolt should be machined down a bit for oil to flow around the bolt, otherwise the bolt blocks the oil flow through the shaft.

I just took off my filter to see your pics, them comps are good roller tip rockers, imo you might be giving up some gain be reverting back to the friction based tips of the 1.6 rockers.

Pull the comp off the shaft and look inside, if they are like mine, not only do they have a wide area for oil flow

Since oem rockers never seem to be a 1.5 its speculation of the 6-12hp increase with a roller tip with all else equal.

I applaud you for the things you do and the attention to detail but another thought is keep the good proven comps and just get a cam with a hair more lift.


Its 12:30 am but I had to go snap a pic here.... If your old cast units are like the pic Robert posted you can see vs the comp that has the groove on the inside, even one hole in the shaft would give pressure to all.

These rockers in the pics, just like your comps are nearly bulletproof, on a comp 295s cam, comp 977-6 springs shift points at 7400, unbushed and never any metal transfer from shaft to rocker body, never a hurt pushrod, and even winter thrashing at 20 degree startups.

IMO the simpler the better, those comps are great rockers and can do so much more then your asking from them, heck if you want to sell them let me know, ive even some tested, ready to bolt on china man rockers that would let you enjoy your summer cruising.

One last thought, have you measured the clearance you have with the cast rocker body to your shaft?

Yes you do have alot of heat and what looks like an abnormal wear pattern, refer to Roberts pic of the wear on that shaft, its where it should be vs what might be the full diameter on yours.

My comps are not on the as delivered shafts, they did get hot so I went to a shaft with a hair more room and probably a harder shaft as well and the problem was fixed.

Can you measure and post the dia. of your current shafts? And maybe the inside diameter of your cast rockers?

It is also a possibility you may not be getting enough oil into your shafts because of leakage because of the shaft spacers [seen in pix], I have read in the past about them causing oil leakage problems.

Yes, this was independant. I did the head porting and CR bump first...baselined with my CompCams 1.5 ratio roller rocker arms, then moved to the Crane 1.6 ratio.

It took me a while because once I measured the pushrod length I found out I needed new stuff, which is what I ordered from Smith Bros.

& I thought my OCD was bad!

IMO, the shafts being blue indicates the root cause of the problem is a lack of oil to the top end(or as mentioned, possibly excessive leakage around the stands).
Even if the holes to feed the valves and pushrods were in the completely wrong place, that would have no impact on how well the shafts are being lubed....... Which appears inadequate in the pics.

I think if you solve the issue that's causing the shafts to turn blue, the other problems will resolve themselves.

Robert, I farm/ranch during the day and also am my wife primary care giver so the nights are the only, mopar/shop time have, but I did trip out when I seen his old rockers were what I consider to be good rockers that can handle alot for being unbushed.

I find this situation interesting because ive never had a serious vt issue and I try some crazy things and the OP always shows alot of attention to detail in his posts concerning his motor/heads.

I've seen a lot of variance in how accurately drilled the cam journal oil passages are. It's on the 'must check' list now. A little off and you just get less oil, far off and next to none or none. Cam bearings seem to be consistent and always line up with the block well.

Dave,


Yes sir, I flipped the shaft upside to show the bannana groves I cut and the specific location of the oiling holes...

BUT

...the oiling holes and the groves are NOT pointing towards the intake when installed, instead they are pointing outwards, towards the valves.

So this looks to be opposite of where they should be aiming.

The shaft ends are marked with a notch, I set them up as follows:

1) driver side - the notch faces the front of the motor
2) pass side - the notch faces the rear of the motor

Wow, so this most trivial of mistakes (I think!) could be causing me the problem I'm seeing?

All the rebuild books I have reference the Driver's side as the LEFT ENGINE BANK. Therefore this is how I have set this up for both my CompCam roller rockers as well as these Crane pieces.

So here is a quote from 'How to How Rod Small Block Mopar Engines', p108: "...Note the notch on the end of hydraulic rocker shaft. It should be pointing to the centerline of the engine and towards the front of the engine on the left bank and to the rear on the right bank...".

Even my ancient HPBooks 'How to rebuild your Small-Block Mppar', p89: "...On driver's (left-hand) side cylinder bank, notch faces to the front of the vehicle. On opposite bank, notch faces rearward. Rocker shaft used with adjustable rockers has small flat spot in the same location...".

Sooo....which way to go here???

Something I noticed with the 1.6 rockers the adjuster is much farther down than the 1.5's. This won't help with your shaft heat, but if IIRC if the adjuster has more than two threads exposed on the bottom the adjuster can block the oil flow from the rocker body to the recessed portion in the middle of the adjuster. So no oil flows out of the center hole in the adjusters ball end.

and are those rocker shaft shims in the picture? Could the shims not be sealing well enough and dumping oil pressure? Also if you over tighten the rocker shaft bolts you can distort the shaft and get it hot.

I've always oriented the shafts so the oil holes are towards the valves.

Yes, the CompCams roller rockers that show in my photo are the 1.5 ratio rockers which I was previously using. You are right, they are nearly identical to the ones you show. They do have the channel/grove on the inside for the oil to flow.


Well, I am getting somewhat to a point where if I can not figure this out without having to spend $$$ on new stuff I probably will toss the 1.5 rockers back on and happily (hopefully) enjoy the season.

Yes, I used the shims to get me to an optimal (what I thought anyways, a pro I'm sure would be able to judge better) rocker arm nose to valve tip alignment. Since I was going from a roller to a sweep rocker I wanted to make sure I started the sweep in the right place to ideally center the rocker nose over the valve tip at max lift.

The shims might cause some oil to bleed off. To try to avert this I actually trimmed the shims so that the inner pieces were actually smaller (width wise) then the bottom pieces, thus forming a "saddle" if you will, so the parts match up as much as possible and leave very little free room that does not get taken up as the shaft bolts are tightened down. HughesEngines actually has a pretty good descritption of this, I went a little smaller than what they list to get better fit.

I torque down just about everything on my car with a torque wrench...the shafts get grade 8 bolts, 16 ft-lbs with SAE 30 oil.

Whats the diameter of the shim hole compared to the hold down bolt? Compared to the hole in the rocker shaft.

No, most of the pushrods actually showed some blueing...not limitted to any particualr cylinder. The valve tip wear I noticed was specifically on #5 exhaust though with a tiny tell-tale (finger-tip) un-evenness on #6 exhaust.

The wear I show, the shiny spots only show up on the bottom of the shaft where you would expect the rocker arm to have the most wear/pressure to deal with. The remaining 3/4 of the circumference does not show any wear...however it is blued.


OK, so the shaft OD is 0.872 where the rocker ID is 0.876, so that gives me some 0.004" of clearance.

The CompCams rockers though are tighter, they are 0.874.

Well you guys, I've decided to run an experiment here.

I am setting up one side with the modified rocker oiling holes, as Robert's photo showed, I will leave the other side as-is. Once the motor is started up I will try to capture some video of the oiling differences....umm...not sure how well that'll turn out...but I've got one of these snake cameras so I'll get that into the valve cover and go from there.

Thanks for the input and suggestions everyone...if I missed anyone pls shoot me a PM.

Lols, set up some plastic sheets and leave the rocker covers off - whichever side hits the garage wall wins

LOL indeed, you are laughing, but I honestly am not sure what to expect once the motor comes off-idle.

So I am usually seeing 10-15psi @ idle, but steady 50-60 during cruise (about 3K). I would like to capture the behaviour in both cases. More importantly I want to make sure that with the additional oiling hole which is aimed at the rocker arm sweep pad I am actualy getting enough oil to the valve tip contact @ idle.

Don't neglect to record it.

I have both of those books right in front of me. partial misprint in the first quote. Yes as you noted the notch should go down & to the front on the left (drivers) side on the shaft and down & to the rear on the right (passenger) shaft. this locates the bottom oiling holes 15 deg offset toward the valve side. I'm thinking Ma wanted it that way cuz the contact pressure between rocker/shaft is gonna be greater on the one side of the shaft as the pushrod raises/rotates the rocker arm so oil would want to be directed to that side. But with that being said, the side hole for the pushrod side dribble down oiling is clocked way off and there is no side hole at all for the valve tip instead it relies on splash from the top hole on my 273 iron rockers or just splash in general on most rockers & for longevity I wanted it better. I also direct oil the heads directly & plug the (2) angled cam oil passages & also limiting crank to cam bearing vertical oiling to 1/16" on each of those 5 cam bearings (which is plenty).

OK, so I managed to video some stuff...first up is the as-designed Crane Ductile Iron rocker arm oiling.

1) rocker @ idle

2) rocker @ rev up

3) rocker shaft at @ rev

Video quality is umm...so-so...meaning, a tad dark, but your player should allow you to brighten it up, etc, etc....meanwhile I'm looking to fix the videos up a bit in the next day or so.

Next up is the equivalent but with the modified oiling setup.

Looks like plenty of oil in both video

...and here is #4 where I drilled the additional oil feed hole directed towards the valve tip itself and tapped the top of the rocker arm feed hole with a @#4-40 machine set screw.

Really hard to see this until towards the end where the oil is getting splashed up against the valve cover walls (dark spots on grey background)...

4) rocker @ rev using modified oil feed passage

All in all, I spent good amount of time "studying" the oiling process the other day. Here are some things I noticed:

1) the as-is top oiling passage provides a good amount of oil to the whole rocker arm, I suppose maybe the oil itself takes away some heat as well from the rocker arm body??? Not quite sure here, but certainly @ idle the rocker nose seems to be oiled well

2) the modified oiling provides massive amounts of oil to both the rocker arm nose as well as the spring itself...I would imagine this must be particularly good for the spring because in that situation it will actually cool the springs and certainly there is no doubt in my mind that this provides for a better valve tip oiling

So at speed (rev up) how can I tell that one is better than the other?

Well, I put on a couple of hrs worth of driving, just local stuff, with a few red-line (6500) shifts. I ran these using the lash-caps. Upon disassembly I found that the modified oiling side showed almost no wear on the caps, whereas the as-designed side did in fact start to wear.

I did notice that the wear pattern on the lash caps was still off towards the exhaust side of the valve, which indicates my geometry is wrong. So as best as I can tell here is my stab at the actual ROOT CAUSE (full analysis from late last season to now):

1) I measured the pushrods and arrived at 7.017" EL in preparation for the Crane rockers
2) I ordered these from Smith Bros
3) I setup the Crane rockers but found a few of them caused intereference between the pushrods and pushrod holes in the heads
4) since pulling the heads (last season) was not an option I used the rocker shaft shims to move the shafts "up & away" to get enough clearance in the pushrod tunnel in the heads
5) this caused the rocker nose sweep to move too far towards the exhaust side, which now caused the valve tip to be heavily loaded on that side in a very limitted surface area @ top lift - probably the worst combination possible from perspective of longevity
6) as-designed the Crane rocker oiling process may not have provided sufficient oiling given the situation described in #5 above, the modified oiling process appears to be able to handle this however, so that is a good lesson-learned

Now there may very well be other problems that may be contributing here that I am simply unaware of. That I simply can not tell at the moment. However, since my goal at this point in time is NOT to start investing in parts which I will only get one more cruising season out of I am going back to my 1.5 CompCams roller rockers. Given the amount of wear I experienced with these Crane sweep rocker arms it is hard to argue the fact that the rollers are a better solution for my combination.

More importantly, I know for a fact that the roller rocker do give me a very narrow valve tip sweep, almost idea I would say. The only worry I have now is whether the two valve tips which have some of that wear will cause a problem for the roller rockers. I will monitor closely.

Big thanks to all of you guys, feedback was greatly appreciated!

and an incredible shout out to YOU for taking the time to thoroughly check out all of this to the nth degree!.