Friday afternoon, around 5 pm, the 565 BBC came to life! After 4 months of work determining what the problems were, purchasing the parts, machine shop work and hours of assembly of the engine (and a whole lot of money $$$$), we are finally almost finished.
The startup was not without problems. The least of the problems was a brand new, bad, spark plug. Number 6 plug would not fire. First time that has happened in over 15 years. The second problem was much harder to find, and I had to have Outlaw’s help to find this problem.
After running the engine for about 10 min. at around 2000 RPM, I noticed oil dripping from the right side header collector. I removed all the plugs from 2, 4, 6 (bad plug) and #8. They looked rich, except #6, which looked almost new, just like I had installed it. I checked the ohmic value of all the spark plug wires and checked the distributor cap. Everything looked and checked out good. Since the valve cover was off and the engine was hot, I reset all the valves on that side. The hot setting is; Intake – .026″ and Exhaust – .028″. They were almost all correct. I did not see anything that would have caused the oil to be coming out of the collector. I cleaned up the inside of the collector and got ready to start up for the 2nd time I also called Outlaw.
Saturday morning, I started the engine for the second time and ran it at around 1100 RPM for about 15 minutes. The temp. got up to a little over 180 degrees, about the same as before. This time, all the plugs were firing and everything sounded good, much better than the first run. The inside of the collector was wet with oil again!
I am not having all kinds of thoughts about what I might have done wrong during assembly, or just about anything that I could think of. All of which involved removing the engine.
Saturday afternoon, about the time LSU had a 13 point lead on Georgia, Outlaw showed up to help me find my problem. He repeated some of the things that I had already done, but he also pulled the right side header. The inside of each exhaust tube was dry! There was no sign of oil inside the exhaust ports in the heads. BIG SIGH OF RELIEFE! Outlaw determined the source of the oil in the collector was from my evacuation tube, connected to the valve cover at the back, over #8 Intake and Exhaust valves. The stud girdle normally keeps the oil from being sucked unto the evacuation system. We may have to devise a way to shield off the inlet to that evac. tube.
I am now ready for the third start up and cool down to seat the rings. Then I will re torque the heads. As of now I am happy with the way things are going, Thanks to Outlaw!