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Adjusting valves....

daveSanborn

Active Member
On a 5.0 roller motor with pedestal mounts? The only "adjustment" available is changing the length of the pushrod. My 347 isn't running quite right. The exhaust has been making a funny sound, moreso on the passenger side than the drivers side, but both don't sound quite right.

The engine starts and runs without fail, but it just doesn't sound quite right. Almost like a "popping" noise, but not a backfire, more like a "huffing noise. I stopped by my trusted mechanics shop today with the car and asked him if I could have a dead/fouled injector. I recently installed the 30# injectors and figured maybe I got a bad one and had a dead/weak cylinder. At idle, he held his palm over the PS exhaust pipe and stated that there was "suction", indicating an improperly adjusted valve. He also stated that he could "hear" that the valves were off just by listening to the exhaust pipe (okay, so I'm not crazy).

To rule out the new injectors as a possible cause, the engine was making this same noise before I changed out the injectors.

Now what?

I pulled the passenger side valve cover off, removed all of the roller rockers and inspected all of the components. I could find nothing amiss. My "weak/generic" engine manual states to pry the rocker upward until the lifter is seated/collapsed and then measure the distance between the rocker tip and the valve tip. It should be somewhere between .1 and .2 inches. This seems like a lot of variance to me, but whatever, it's in the manual so it must be right. Where can I get a tool to pry the roller rockers back? I'm familar with the traditional rocker tool, but I don't think it will work on roller rockers due to their design.

I had both heads off a few months ago and remember inspecting the valves and everything looked great. Like new actually with no abnormalities.

Any ideas on anything related to this problem are welcome. With the exception of the curse of Midlife, at this point I'm open to considering anything as the source of the problem.
 
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