Polishing a turd.

[cleatus12r]

Wow. I have never had this much trouble getting something like this done. The entire valvetrain of this engine has been nothing but a thorn in my side for the past 2.5 months. The short block is done though. The distributor gear is done and the oil pump, pan, front cover, and water pump are installed. The lifter retainer spring plate mounting bolt holes were fun but fits like a million bucks.

Debacle:

First, the wait for the cam. Nobody had one and after ordering directly from COMP, I waited over a month for most of the parts to show up. Mainly I was waiting on the lifters as I had to have them at the machine shop doing the lifter bore bushings. Well, they didn't have the retainers and keepers in stock so I figured (like most normal people) that the stock ones would work. No dice. The new springs are larger diameter and the inner ones don't fit with the rotators on the exhaust valves. Great. Call COMP back and order recently back-in-stock retainers and keepers. Oh, that'll be $90 instead of $34 since the "kit" was broken up initially. Fine. Gotta have them.

The retainers and keepers showed up yesterday so I busted out a head and thought I'd start changing the springs. First exhaust valve.....no issues as it went together beautifully. I pulled the intake valve from the same cylinder............AAAARRRGGGHHHHH!!! 4-GROOVE keepers on the intake valves!

Called COMP again. No stock on the super-locks with 4-grooves. Ran around (as much running can be done on the web) and finally found a set of them although I had to buy the full 16-valves' worth kit instead of 8 for $64. Yep, get 'em on the way as I have to have them...........

So now I will have a full set of spare 10 degree "super-locks" for a 335-series laying around for the next one I do. This has been such a rough experience I think I'll just buy remans or sell off cores to people from here on.

Here is a picture of the valve springs. I have never done a roller cam retrofit in something and I cannot believe the seat pressure difference from the stock flat tappet springs.

Left is the stock spring, center is the new spring with dampener, and right is the new inner spring (that required a different style valve seal that I had to buy separately too). This roller cam better be worth it!