rooster287

UPDATE: Yesterday we ran the drill for a bit longer to finish priming the oil pump and buttoned the engine up. We proceeded to start the engine and take it up to around 2500 RPM to start breaking it in. The engine sounded great! There were no odd noises and it ran very smoothly. We ran into a couple of issues including having our timing gun go out. Also, it appears that I had a crack in one of the lines connecting the tranny to the radiator so I had a pool of tranny fluid under the car so we shut it down after about 45 seconds. Today we'll be getting the gun and fluid lines fixed and going back at it. We did notice that the oil pressure was reading 95 psi. After pulling both valve covers the oil inside the cover on cylinder 7 seemed low (not alot of spalshing inside the cover). Is 95 PSI too high? One of my buddies seemed to think so.

thanks everyone for your comments. we'll be back in the saddle over the next few days and i'm feeling a lot less nervous about starting the engine for the first time.

hi Jt1, we were using just fingers before we put the drill on it. I'm using CompCams break in lube. one item i didn't mention was that oil was "squirting" out of the rocker arms on 1/2 cylinders while the ones towards the back of the motor were hardly a dribble of oil. I'm not sure if the position of the lifters could cause this kind of distribution of oil when priming.

the oil gauge was attached to the port on the motor where you would put the sending unit.

I'm hoping someone can help me with a question on engine break in. I have 74 260z with a SBC 350 that i've recently had rebuilt (bottom end only) and today we were supposed to break the motor in. The entire top end had been put on and the cooling system in place and we filled the radiator. The first issue I noticed was leakage from around several freeze plugs. Although it wasn't gushing out, there was a steady drip from at least two of the plugs. We weren't entirely happy about but figured that we could fix it with some Bars leak. Ok so onto pumping oil up into the top end of the engine. We added five quarts of non-detergent oil to the engine and a filter. We then attached an old distrubtor without gears that would engage the oil pump. We also put on a oil gauge outside to be able to read the pressure as we worked the oil pump. We put a drill motor onto the old distrubtor and slowly turned the distrubutor so that the oil pump would push oil through the engine. This was going fine for about 10-15 seconds when the drill motor seemed to "seize". I could see the pressure reading at about 40 and when the drill stopped it slowly fell to 0. I pulled the drill off the distributor and cranked it by hand. Two things i noticed. One, I could get up to 40 PSI with a few quick turns of the distrbutor. The second issue was that the distriubtor was really fighting me so much that after about three turns by hand it wanted to back out - kind of like winding a rubber band. We had the valve covers off and on the several of the push rods oil spurted out. I thought maybe the filter was the issue (wrong type for the car) but verified that I had the proper one installed. I spoke with a different friend who said that there should be no way to get up to 40 psi oil pressure by just turning the distributor by hand. Now i'm wondering if the oil "passages" in the engine weren't propelry cleaned and that the high PSI is from the oil being forced through the clean passages. Has anyone experience a problem like this on break-in with very high oil pressure? thanks!