On Tuesday, Caleb (CNM67) and I took the front of the truck back apart and pulled the motor so it would be up on the stand when Bobby got there on Wednesday morning...
Once the motor was out, we could see that it was leaking oil from the pan and not the rear seal, so that was good news. Drained all the oil out, took the pan off, and then Bobby did a job on the oil pan that doesnt look like it will ever leak. Once that was done, Bobby looked everything over and found a few oversights that Caleb and I had missed and we corrected those little things. We then got the motor put back in after fighting with the transmission a little while. The tranny did not want to line up with the motor, but Bobby and Caleb were able to get it in there while I stood in the shade and took pictures
Since the super cooler radiator that we had put in Caleb's truck decided to spring a leak, we decided to put in the super cooler radiator that is for my Crew Cab. The plan was to take the leaking one and get it fixed and then just run it in the crew cab since they are both the same radiators:
Only problem with that plan is once we got the crew cab radiator in the truck and the motor running, it decided it wanted to leak too. So now, the 1st radiator is in the shop getting fixed and we will swap it back in when it comes back, and then my radiator is going to the shop to get fixed as well.
Anyway, back on track... We got the motor back in and the truck put back together. When it came time to fire it up, we had ZERO compression. None at all. We ended up pulling a valve cover and Bobby immediately saw that the valves were not closing and ALL of the brand new push rods were now bent. This one even stumped Bobby for a while and at first thought we might have had the wrong push rods. We compared them to the rods in the old 352 and they were the same size. The rocker assembly was identical too. Bobby then used a magnet and pulled one of the new lifters out and pulled an old one out of the 352. The new lifters that were sent to us with the rebuild kit were the wrong lifters. They sat 1/4 inch higher at the spring than the correct FE lifters were supposed to sit. We never caught this because we built this motor from scratch and did not have old lifters to compare it to. With the difference, it bent all of the pushrods and was keeping the valves open which resulted in no compression.
Anyway, since the motor does not have a stock manifold on it, the manifold had to come off in order to get all of the lifters out:
So ran around yesterday and was able to find a shop that had a full set of 16 lifters in stock. Grabbed that, a new manifold gasket set, and then we were able to find 8 push rods in stock. We had to use some push rods from the 352, but with all of that, we got the motor back together and got it started.
Then, we saw that there appeared to be a bad vacuum leak which we could not find. Worst case scenario was that the manifold gasket slipped, but before we ripped the motor apart again (it was getting late at this point), I pulled my freshly rebuilt Edelbrock 750 carb out and we took the Edelbrock 600 carb off the 390. When we switched the carbs, it ran like a champ. So now Caleb's carb needs to be rebuilt and then we can swap those back.
Anyway, after it got broken in, we shut it off, everyone high fived, and Bobby left to go get some dinner with his better half. This time, we were smart enough to get the underside of the hood painted while it was off again:
So we put the hood on and went to start the truck back up to move it out of the driveway and found that we now had no spark...
At this point, its dark out and past the time we had alloted to work on this truck. A quick check of the coil and the MSD system showed that they are both working, so the problem must be in the Duraspark. Going to OHM test it tomorrow and see what it says and then swap the internals with another Duraspark we have and see if that solves the problem. But that is the only thing it can be at this time. We have no spark at all when we try to start it, but using the jumper wire trick on the MSD box shows the ignition system and coil are working fine.
At least we know the motor is working and already broken in. Caleb took some video while it was running and hopefully he can post it up. The thing sounded great, but will sound a lot better once he gets his headers and Magnaflow exhaust done.
