Well, My Pal Dave broke the Gold Car....Seeing your newly revived hot rod and motor on a rollback is something that usually isn't good. Fortunately, in this case it was not terminal and is already back on the road.
We got the newly modified EFE (heat riser) valve in place this morning and the exhaust hooked back up. We also installed a 180 degree thermostat. The car is completely different with two open exhaust pipes. Quite frankly it is a beast. It ran good before this problem got diagnosed, but the difference now is incredible. We took it out for a shake down cruise and wow.
There is a nice stretch of four lane highway near my house that is part of a 10 mile loop that I frequently run. I drove it out and once on the four lane took it kind of easy and kept the top speed below 95 MPH. At the turn around point I switched spots with MPD and he got out of control. As best we can figure he was running along at about 120 MPH and the car was still pulling hard. The speedo only goes to 100 MPH and it was pretty much half way between 100 and O MPH - dead nuts on 6:00 o'clock. He swears the tach was only at about 4500 rpm, but with 3.42 gears I think it was well past the red line. Regardless, the engine started making noises that sounded like a hay baler with a lot of mechanical noise from the left bank and we quickly coasted to a stop on the berm. After a few minutes we restarted it hoping for divine intervention, but it has obviously been too long since I was in church.
Once the rollback got the car home we quickly tore it apart and got the valve cover off. As it turns out the rocker slipped off the push rod on the exhaust side of number 3 cylinder. Luckily the push rod wasn't bent, and after a lot of pain pulling spark plugs and manually rotating the engine, we got the pushrod and rocker re-installed. Once everything was buttoned up it fired first time and sounded great. We took it for another shake down (with me driving) and ran it pretty hard and everything is once again good. That was enough excitement for one day.
BTW - with two exhausts and a 180 degree thermostat the engine temps stayed between 175 and 185. Perfect.
Here's a couple sad pictures.
