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!.