last year Around March before i left for Iraq I rebuilt the engine in my 76 Ford F150. IT was a 351 M 400, I broke it down cleaned it painted the block ford blue, but an engine rebuild kit, w/a high torque high performance cam shaft, bored the block out 60 over and bought all the new stuff, ie.. headers,starter, btry, spark plugs&wires, coil, chrome engine dress up kit, i even got a rear end off an F-100 6cyl and put that on (lower gear ratio). It was my first time rebuilding but my dad helped , and it wasnt his first time. We did everything correct and to tell you the truth it wasnt that hard. We had one of the heads rebuilt and bought another from Auto Zone. Now when we had it all together and did the start up procedures it sounded BAD (not good). I thought it was just a vacume leak, well after about 1 week of trying to figure out what was wrong I heard a knocking coming from the head i got from Auto Zone so i took off the valve cover and all the push rods were GONE, so i took off the intake manifold and they were all in the bottom "bent" ! Now I know i didnt do anything wrong, everything was torqued to the "T", but AZ said that i had to have done something but I told them that it only bent the pushrods on the side that i bought the Head from you! They told me to take it up to this local shop and have the check the head out and if it was the head then AZ would pay for everything. Well i didnt get a chance to take it up there because I got deployed to Iraq but i will be home in one month. So what do you think might have happened and what do you think my chances are of AutoZone holding their promise after 1 year!!

 

The valve stems were probably not set at the correct height. Did you check the lifter preload? There is a number of things that they could have done wrong.

 

why didn't your dad get it taken care of. A bad deal!

 

was the head they supplied machined down far enough for teh valves to hit the pistons did you cheack piston to valve clearance b4 assembly if not you didnt do everything you where supposed to when building the motor, if you did check it and all was good let us know what the prob ended up being, by the way u didnt use hydraulic roller lifters and cam did you?