[PontGuy]

Thats a really nice car, need to get that one running right!

The polylock shouldn't bottom out on the stud shoulder! Since we are doing pictures, here is one of the old bottleneck studs and polylocks that I dug up. The first pic shows them separately and the second shows the lock screwed down all the way until it runs out of threads. You can see that the bottom goes well below the shoulder. And if you look at the wear marks you can see that it will adjust down well below where the rockers were running on whatever cam I last used. So plenty of adjustment. Maybe your polylocks were designed for use with straight-up studs (or a Chevy?)

So you need to find some new studs and/or locks that match up to make it work right. Everything else looks fine to me and then you should be able to pre-load the lifters properly. This has to be step #1.

The compression numbers are pretty high but not as high as I was afraid they would be. If the valves are not set properly then I would think you might see some scattering in the numbers. So the jury is still out on that one.

Walt