So the bitch is out on the parkin' lot and this part of the story is toast!
Sum dumazz tried to shortcut the distributor stab the other day and made a wrong decision, so when we went to lite the motor...guess what?
After fixxin' that scruup, since the lifters weren't pumped, valve timing went to hail...so gettin' her fired off took a bit of doin'. Also we ended up havin' ta rig the electric fuel pump in order to prime the mechanical fuel pump since she'd been dry for so long.
Once she lit off, thangs settled down real quick and oil pressure cold is 64 at 2000rpm. Twenty minutes at 2000 gits the lifters goin' real good, then it's back to a preliminary idle setting....with a somewhat erratic lifter clack on the driver side. Currently hot idle oil pressure is 24, with a hot pressure of 58 at 2500rpm.
Now that I got about two hours run time on the motor in the shop, the lifter noise has subsided, though I did replace two pushrods that appeared to be "short".
I'm now convinced that the lifters that were near new at the time I tore the motor down are the wrong items to have been used. Robert and I jawwed about this extensively again yesterday and we keep discovering more anomalies about this whole lifter deal.
I scruud up and neglected to visually verify the construction of each of the lifters before installing, just cleaned the peripheral and stuck in the hole...really stoopid mistake on my part.
So...once sonja gits some runtime on the motor, I'm gonna pop the lifters and install one last set of new johnson lifters with the proper base crown, I don't trust what we got right now. Here's an analysis from the wayback machine:
http://www.forums.IHPartsAmerica.com/gas-engine-tech/965-odd-lifter-wear-pattern-152-a.html
I built the carb a few days ago but found it to very over-jetted (#72h!!!!!) with a bum power valve and a accel pump cam that is way too big for this app, the jets were corrected to "normal" in prep for dial-in. Now that the rig can be driven, the whole carb/ignition dial-in will have to be done from scratch, even though the msd 6a cd box is functional, the distributor still is runnin' points and those need to go away when the price of aygs goes back up. And the 10si alternator has a bad case of extreme bearing noise so a swap is also on the list. In fact, bill is planning a total refresh of the engine-bay electrical mess.
The tranny played real nice after a long vacation, no issues there. The oem brakes are very marginal, drums combined with a pancake booster don't work worth shit with the big tires!
So this phase is a wrap...bitch needs about 500 miles drivetime and then the oil dumped for the good stuff after one more lifter replacement. Gonna be real nice to see her azzend headed up the driveway hill after four years...and not onna rollback!