I was able to finally get my trucking running today for more than a few seconds, was having carb issues that I believe are now fixed.
My question is what is the best way to tell if I'm getting oil to the top of the engine? The passenger side seems to be tapping alot louder than the driver side. I thought it might quiet down once the engine warmed up but it didnt go away. What is the best way to test the oil pressure, I have the top oiling system and I figure if I pull a valve cover i will end up with a big mess. The truck was last driven in 1986

 

I do not think you will be able to do much without pulling the rocker covers. There are only two nuts per side. (It will not be a mess if your problem is low oil pressure.) Buy some good neoprene gaskets and use weather-strip adhesive to glue them to the rocker covers. From then on, taking the covers on & off will be a breeze. With mechanical lifters, you should be adjusting or at least checking the valve lash on some sort of regular schedule. This is part of the fun of operating a Y-block.

Now for the "down side": the hollow rocker arm shafts get their oil from a rather tortous set of passages throught the block & heads, that carry pressurized oil from the top side of the cam bearings. The cam bearings get their oil pressure from below. If the bearings are worn, pressure to the top end is minimal, and there is less flow, plus sludge slowly restricts the passages until they can even get totally plugged. Repairing this is not easy - it involves at least removing the heads, and ideally, involves a total tear-down.

It can happen that one side is affected more than the other. A common cure was to use very small diameter tubing (3/16") and steal a little oil from putting a Tee fitting on the oil pressure sender. Run it into a hole drilled & tapped in each rocker arm shaft. There used to be kits that did the whole thing without much modification. (You did have to find a way to slip the tubing under or through the rocker covers.) Somebody on FTE may have an extra parts engine that still has one of these kits.

 

Thanks for the reply, I will pull the covers off and see if she is getting oil. What I meant to say is it would probably not be a good idea to pull a cover off with the motor running

 

Start out with the motor off, until you get used to the idea. As I said, if you have an oiling problem there will not be much oil. If you have a severe oiling problem, the sludge will be baked and cracked like a desert - I have seen this many times.

Once you have gotten used to the idea, cover the exhaust manifolds with some aluminum foil to keep oil spatters from making a lot of smoke. Run the engine at an idle and observe. (This will probably be a little more relaxing if you do it one side open at a time & have an assistant start & stop the engine at your command.)

The rockers should each have oil flowing out their sides on the rocker shaft. An oil hole in the rocker should let a little bit of oil run down the top to oil the tip of the rocker where it operates the valve. Enough oil should splash on the ball adjustment that the socket on the top end of the pushrod is wet. If some rockers are wet & some are dry, you may be able to just dis-assemble and clean the rocker arm assembly. If you have more $$$ than time, you can exchange your cores for a pair of rebuilt units. Do not do this if there is not enough oil, because you will just wreck the new ones.

Let us know what you find.

P.S.: The valve lash must be checked hot (.019", as I remember) and can be done not running, but the fun is to learn to do it running. See what you have to look forward to?

 

Cool, now I will no exactly what is suppose to be getting oil. Adjusting valves with the engine running sounds interesting never done that before. I remember i had a vw and adjusted those every oil change, was pretty simple.
Well i will let you know my findings, thanks again!

 

i've heard of FE guys cutting tops off old valve covers to watch valvetrain at work/oiling. helped cut down on the oil mess during engine run.

 

Good idea, ranch67, but I would suggest that the outside wall be cut pretty low and rolled over. When adjusting valve lash with the engine running, the rocker traps the feeler gage and carrys it down as the valve opens. That feeler gage is hand-held, so you do not want a pinch point or a raw edge. I never bothered with anything to control oil and just let the oil spots burn off the hot exhaust manifold. Even my rebuilt engines never put that much oil up at an idle to be much problem.

A '57 272 should have self-locking adjusters. I remember doing valve adjustments static with the lock-nut type ('54-'56) and then double-checking running. They even made a tool that let you manipulate the screw and lock-nut with one hand while you held the feeler in the other, but I never had one. When I got the $$$, I converted to later rocker arms. I have had mostly hydraulic lifters for a long time, but I still miss those old days when I adjusted Y-block valve lash with the engine running.

 

Update: Well I dont seem to have any major oiling issues. I did notice that the rocker shaft support bracket above #4 was very loose, not even hand tight. Maybe that is what was making the noise cause it doesnt seem as loud now.

 

Shane,

Anything loose will add to the clatter, so you found at least part of the problem. Be sure to check the valve lash in the area of anything you tighten down. These rockers may have been adjusted while the stands were not tight and when you tighten things down you will lose clearance.

You can adjust your Y-block's valve lash static - it just takes 2 turns stopping every 1/4-turn, instead of the 1/2-turn stops your VW required. Just chalk the harmonic damper on the timing mark & every 90 degrees. The BIG difference is that your VW was done cold and the Y-block is done hot. (You probably will have to pull the plugs to turn it over by hand - you can also just bump the starter.)

Glad to hear you will not have to play games to get your top end oiled. Keep fresh oil in it and it will go a long way. Do you have a PCV system or a road tube?

 

Thanks for the Valve lash advice, I have the the old road draft tube, funny thing is the PO bent the tube on the bottom of the canister in half. I wonder why they would do that

 

If the bend is what I think it is, they did not do it on purpose. You mention canister, so you must have the early system which was one of the most major design errors Ford made on early Y-blocks. The filter in the canister clogs up and gets ignored, because most other engines did not have such a filter to deal with. This leads to a very sludged up engine, which increases the upper oiling problem. Later road tubes were from the valley cover around the bellhousing - and that was not a very good system either.

I started working on Y-blocks right about the time the first vehicles had a PCV system, but I liked my road draft tubes. As I grew older & wiser, I started realizing that a forced change-out of the crank-case gasses was a good idea for the engine itself, as well as the environment.

In 1968 I built a 312 and did my own PCV. I am sharing this so that others can learn from my miss-steps. I had T-Bird cast aluminum valve covers which already had unfiltered breathers on them. I plumbed a PCV valve from the vacuum port at the back of the intake manifold to the road-tube port on the late-model valley cover.

First (minor) mistake: No filtering on an active PCV system.
Second (major) mistake: The manifold vacuum port is only for vacuum heater controls & such. The problem is that the manifold is a dual-plane design, so if a serious amount of air is injected into one plane, a lean condition is created. At around 20,000 miles I had to do a valve job. I was smart enough to realize that I needed to use an under-carb PCV plate that divided the load equally on both sides of the carb.

I recommend you use the proper plate for your carb - you should be able to find one in a junk-yard cheap, or perhaps from someone on FTE. I would recommend you use a "modern" approach: pull air out of one rocker cover and admit filtered air into the other rocker cover. This would mean blocking off your crankcase road-tube port and at least limiting the amount of breathing that your oil filler cap does - perhaps a little silicone in the horse-hair filter. This will be more important for short runs around town. On the highway, a road tube would probably work OK, so long as it was maintained.

 

Thanks Archie,
The plate on my carb has the hole at the front of it with a hose that attaches to the canister. Do they make valve covers to attach a hose for the method you have described or do you fabricate your own, I guess I dont really undrstand how the whole ventilation thing works.

 

If you have a PCV valve at your carb and a hose going to the canister, then the engine was converted to a closed crankcase earlier in its life. The bent road tube was a fast way to plug the tube - I assume the bend makes a sharp, flat kink that seals it. This system would draw air in through the oil filler's horse-hair filter, through the valley, and crankcase. The rocker covers would be sort of "on their own" - excess fumes would eventually work their way down the pushrod holes, but there would be no positive top-end ventillation.

I suspect Ford felt that top-end ventilation was necessary as most of their V-8's (so far as I have seen) use the "in one rocker cover & out the other" system. The major source of fumes should be the crankcase, but it is constantly bathed in a shower of hot oil. The rocker-covers, on the other hand are sort of dead, "end-of-the-line" spaces, with a lot of parts for moisture to condense out on, creating sludge. I would only change your PVC system if all your driving is short runs with cheap oil and a long time between oil changes. If you think it looks ugly, you could remove the canister on the side of the engine (two large phillips screws, as I remember), and put on a block-off plate with a hose fitting on it, .

The above paragraph is only my observations & ideas, so I would be interested in the ideas of others.

 

Ok, thanks for the clarification I just wanted to make sure my current set up was not a bad thing, sounds like it should be sufficient. Yes the tube on my canister is bent upward and kinked to block it off.

 

Make sure whoever adjusts the valve lifters knows what they are doing, it's not exactly a common procedure these days, but no big deal to find a competent shop yet. If it's clattering at all then they may need adjusting, (but see below first) the y-blocks are actually pretty quiet when setup right. It's got to be done hot and set within spec of course.

I like MMO for any upper oiling issues and it will quiet the solid lifters if they are oil starved from sludge. I tried it in the fuel and a pint or so in the crankcase. The only way it works for this purpose though is to use one quart of MMO in lieu of one quart of oil during an oil change. The y-blocks don't like short trips around town, the engine will get loaded up fast it's important to keep these engines clean as mentioned above.