Opened 'er up and this is what I found

[DoubleDingo]

Valves adjusted and almost ready to button it up.

 

[DoubleDingo]

I have an extra HEI distributor from my '65 that has been sitting in the storage/work room. It has higher quality cap, rotor, wires, etc. So I dug it out. When I was removing the cap and wires from the engine so I could add the better stuff, I saw this wire touched the exhaust manifold on the passenger side. It still ran well but the way my friend routed the wires when we did the vortec swap, it is a wonder it took this long for it to make contact. I should have checked his work before running it all this time. It's okay, got some new plug wires when I got new oil and filter, because one of the wires from the '65 didn't have a contact for the spark plug.

 

[DoubleDingo]

I didn't get any pics of the finished product, I was hungry so we went to get a late breakfast after I buttoned everything up yesterday.

 

[HotRodPC]

It appears you did the right thing by shutting it down and getting it towed home. May have avoided a catastrophic failure and not been so lucky had you limped it back home.

 

[DoubleDingo]

It appears you did the right thing by shutting it down and getting it towed home. May have avoided a catastrophic failure and not been so lucky had you limped it back home.

For sure. I even hated firing it up to turn it around in the driveway so the front was facing the house. When I did that I fired it up, put it in gear immediately, pulled forward under the low rpm, rolled into the street and did a u-turn and back into the driveway. Maybe 10 seconds no more than 15 seconds.

I am so glad I got it towed. If I was younger I would've tore into it right then and there. Being a little older & hopefully a little wiser, with good insurance that has plenty of tow miles, and with the girlfriend with me and a truck load of camping gear and three dogs, to me the best thing was get it home and regroup.

 

[Thunder]

I may be a little late and may have missed it, but in the original picture doesn't it look like the rocker on the next cylinder forward look a little angled also. Would that be #5 intake?

 

[HotRodPC]

He changed all the rockers and all the push rods, so it's all good now. It is likely there were others soon to go too. I think he realized he had the wrong push rods, and/or rockers.

 

[MrMarty51]

I never even knew about these things " Self Aligning Rocker-Arms ".
I always thought a stock rockerarms was all the same.

 

[DoubleDingo]

I may be a little late and may have missed it, but in the original picture doesn't it look like the rocker on the next cylinder forward look a little angled also. Would that be #5 intake?

Yeah, all of them were angled, with some worse than others.

 

[DoubleDingo]

He changed all the rockers and all the push rods, so it's all good now. It is likely there were others soon to go too. I think he realized he had the wrong push rods, and/or rockers.

The pushrods were okay as far as length. If that one wasn't bent I may have reused them. But I replaced them since it was cheap insurance while I was in there.

 

[DoubleDingo]

I never even knew about these things " Self Aligning Rocker-Arms ".
I always thought a stock rockerarms was all the same.

I had never heard of them either, which is why I just swapped over the rockers from the heads I pulled off the block, and reused the pushrods. I really thought stock rocker arms were self-aligning by design. Apparently they wander a little on the valve stem, and my case, they wandered a lot.

(I tried to use the "multi" function, but for some reason it didn't cooperate.)

 

[willwinchforfoo]

Off topic but my HF dial indicator is run across a cal bench check every year at work (aviation mech) and it checks as accurate as the starretts. Same with he micrometers. The torque wrenches I bought were awful. The calibration tech said it was the worst he has ever seen. We are talking 10+ ft lbs on the 3/8 wrench. HF took them back so I could buy more stuff I don't need from them.

Interesting thread and something for me to watch out for when I do a head swap.

 

[HotRodPC]

Off topic but my HF dial indicator is run across a cal bench check every year at work (aviation mech) and it checks as accurate as the starretts. Same with he micrometers. The torque wrenches I bought were awful. The calibration tech said it was the worst he has ever seen. We are talking 10+ ft lbs on the 3/8 wrench. HF took them back so I could buy more stuff I don't need from them.

Interesting thread and something for me to watch out for when I do a head swap.

That's great info to know. I've got one of the cheap HF dial indicators and magnetic base for setting up differential gears. I didn't think I'd ever use it for aircraft critical tolerances but assumed it would be close enough for differentials if I had my specs in the middle of the tolerance spectrum. Sounds like it will indeed be good enough for differential use.