its not low on oil either. seems to drop oil pressure when i wind it up.
its an old motor. a 1971 thats never been torn down but only has 75,000 original miles on it.was running good .

sludged up oil pickup?

had a couple stock engines when mains were bad would drop in oil pressure while under acceleration and gain it back when deccel. in same gear also if its an elec. gauge try adding it with mechanical and see what happens.

it allready has a mechanical gauge. was originally a 2 barrel motor . i swapped on a 4 barrel about 1000 miles ago and have been running it a little harder than it was before. never past 5,000 rpm's though.

been said here before,, plugged up oil pick up screen.

try bringing the car up to highway speed in drive take a note of the pressure then accelerate but not enough to hit passing gear if the pressure falls then let off the pedal the pressure may rise, if not then its not the mains and hopefully not but its easy to check and i always chack the easiest thing first at least when my heads not up my ### maybe even try changing oil and filter.

Valve stem seals packed in the pickup.

dumped in some lucus oil treatment and it fixed it. not sure what that means though

It means that you may have loose mains and that you thickened the oil.

Take for oil pickup off you'll find all your valve seals stuck in screen.

it has been blowing a big puff of smoke when i fire it up.

If it smokes on start up the valves seals are bad. They're so bad they've hardened, broken apart, fallen into your oil pan and are plugging the pick-up tube screen.

I finally pulled the oil pan off and removed the oil pickup tube. it was not clogged.
the motor is on an engine stand now.
the motor has never been apart and only has a little over 70,000 miles on it but it is a 1972 so its old.
how can I tell if the bearings are the issue?
I would like to pull the heads and have them redone and continue to use the motor in my pickup. I was hoping to get by with just installing new rings and bearings since it is low mileage and still ran good.

Wow, an OP reviving a 5 year old thread

Carefully remove the main caps, take lots of pictures and post them up here. Don't mix anything up or drop it yet.

I'm assuming you don't have access to a bore mic and calipers to measure your clearances. You could use some plasti-gauge and see what the clearances are, although this isn't very accurate. You could measure, get new main bearings, re-measure, and they should at least be tighter.

I'd put a new oil pump in it too.

I would 2nd the worn main bearing theory, I've been there too

wow it has been 5 years I pulled the motor out back when I had the oil pressure problem and dropped in a temporary motor, now the temporary motor is needing replaced. since it was worn out when I got it. but this 360 is a good motor and I didn't want to screw it up. I have owned it since it only had 30,000 miles on it. now I need to fix it and get it back in my truck.
I don't have a bore mic, I do have a cheap set of digital calipers.
I will pull the caps off and get pictures, I will mark the caps to make sure I get them back on the right place. probably tomorrow.
thanks

Old Quaker Sludge oil used to cause lots of that years ago. Gotta love the old paraffin based oils.

took some pictures of the main bearings. there was some small groves In the bearings but didn't seem to be any on the crank.

number one