You Know You Are Into Some Serious Car Doctor When You Have to Get the Ice Out!

[Jason Edge]

You know you are into some serious car doctoring when you have to get the ice packs out. More to come on my 64 Coupe de Ville resuscitation in the next 1963/64 Cadillac Chapter Newsletter!  Mades some serious headway on honing in on the valvetrain noise issue ... and it was not quite what I expected. More to come in the next newsletter!

[Kurt]

I believe ice packs are used in the treatment of cadmium poisoning. Is that the issue? LOL! But seriously, when is the newsletter coming out? Can't wait to hear what it is. Have you made a video or audio file of the noise?

[Jason Edge]

Newsletter will hopefully be ready in 1 to 2 weeks.  I'll put the other 8 lifters in the engine tomorrow. You could hear the lifter tick pretty good in that leaving & returning out of the driveway video if you turn up the volume... it's actually embarrassing loud! LOL  I think I have found the problem ... and as noted a bit different from what I expected to find!  I do have some other isolated video and haven't posted here until I was ready to work on the car... else I would get a lot of speculations.  Within seconds of posting the driveway video I had one person post my intake might be cracked.
just fyi. I will be excited at the possibility of getting Dino running right again, but I'm not going to push anything. I enjoy the journey as much as the destination. I remember way back I threatened to rebuild my engine, and 5 years later I started the process and it took 3 months. I think Tony (hey Tony) was going to flip his lid at my slow pace! LOL 
Anyway, I have the 8 other lifters I couldn't install with valve covers off only, soakinng in some new oil as seen below and will install tomorrow and probably get the rocker arms and maybe valve covers back on. I have a new valley cover and that new Cad-Bling to install then I will go stare at my intake for  a day or two and decide if I want to go ahead and repaint.. or just stick on and try it out. The clean-up and repaint will be a slippery slope so I might want to just get everything back installed and cleaned up a bit as I go. I will at least have that fresh valley cover and bolts.  Here's the lifters adrift in Texas Tea:

 

[Jason Edge]

New, Made in USA Melling Lifters and Push Rods. Prepping for install here... installed last night.  Valley cover went on this am.

[Kurt]

I just read the story in the newsletter. So those lifters were installed by T-Hoff in the late 90's? If so has it been ticking for a long time? Really strange how that shorter lifter got in the mix. I would tend to believe that it is a different part number rather than a milling error but stranger things have happened I guess. Looks like a good tech tip is to compare all the lifters in size prior to installing.

[Jason Edge]

No, I installed lifters when I rebuilt engine in 2012 and it run perfect with no noise until 2 years ago.

[Jason Edge]

Just to add the head rebuild could be an article in itself. I dropped a valve just around the corner from the house, had the car towed to a touted "old car school professional" to have heads pulled and rebuilt. It sat there 2 weeks and I called them and they said, we can't get to the heads since the exhaust are still attached and we have not touched it. I'm like REALLY! So, I had it towed back home. I popped heads of with exhaust manifolds still attached, pulled exhaust off heads, and took to an old school engine builder named "Jason" at T-Hoff downtown Raleigh, NC. In a few days he had the head rebuilt with new parts and I had them back on the car. I am sure I probably replaced lifters then too, but the bad (i.e. short) lifter was put in by me when rebuild the engine in 2012. Other than the heads not much was put back in the engine that wasn't new.

[Jason Edge]

Tony, You have what I am saying backwards. The lifter was significantly shorter than the others --> 7/100ths of an inch.  It is my belief that when the springs got a bit worn and couldn't compensate for the shorter lifter, resulting in excess valve lash, which caused some extra wear on the bottom ridge of the lifter as the cam lob  spunaround and met the lifter. Perhaps mushrooming is not the best word here. The  gap between lifter and lifter bore is between 5/10,000 and 2/1000th of an inch. On other words they are a very tight fit. It is my best guess the lifter was simply cast short. You can physically see the height difference and first thing I was drawn to:

 

[0hsy7we8jmzty]

Great to read that you got to the source of that annoying "tick" and that Dino is back on the road again.  And that engine compartment looks soooo good!  I never knew these cars had so much gold cadmium under the hood.

[Jason Edge]

I got some interesting replies on the lifter issues. I think the point most people have missed is the fact that 7/100ths of an inch is a big visible difference.  Tolerances for these parts are in the 1000ths and 10,000ths, not 100ths. I had a couple suggess the lifter just wore down that much... that would be mind bending that in 3000 miles the lifter wore down perfectly flat retaining a like new surface appearance, and the other 15 lifters were completely unaffected. I think it has got to be a miscast but I'm keeping an open mind. I did not need a caliper when I looked a the lifter sitting below the rim of the lifter bore, and defintely didn't need one when I sat it next to a good 2" tall lifter as seen below.  This is one of the reasons I didn't want to try and explain it in a few sentences here and instead try to give details with pictures in the newsletter article.  The only thing I might add is that perhaps and maybe more plausible it is the incorrect lifter for my engine. More could be the same but height intended for another engine? Who knows... but for now we are good... knock on a metal valve lifter.... just don't squash it down short!
So.. here again is "shorty" next to a correct height new lifter...

[Jason Edge]

Especially when  you are trying to "push your rod!"