These valve covers are now in process.  I am hoping to have prototypes by the end of April, with the production parts available sometime in June.  So far I have not finalized the filler cap situation, but am planning for a screw-in style.  Anyone who is interested in a set of these can get on my list by emailing me at jayb@fepower.net, posting under this thread, or calling me at 952-428-9035.  No deposit required, and if you have to decline delivery when the time comes, that's OK, but please don't say you'd like a pair if you are not serious.  I will ship off the list on a first come, first served basis.  Pricing for the valve covers, plain without the screw-in plugs or breathers, will be $259 per pair plus shipping, including attachment hardware. 

The valve covers are pentroof style with a fine sand-cast finish.  I expect to have multiple variations of these valve covers available as machining options.  For example, plain cast, each cover machined for one breather, each cover machined for two breathers, fins on the top, top cut off with a plexiglass cover so that the valve train is visible, cut for master cylinder clearance, etc. etc.  These valve covers will fit the Dove end stands without any modification.  Also custom scripts machined into the top of the valve cover will also be available for additional cost of $50-$100 per pair, depending on the complexity of the design and the CNC time.

First production run will be 50 pairs of valve covers, with a follow-up production run of another 50 pair.  After that, depending on if they sell, I may continue to build them, or I may discontinue them.  Some pictures of a 3D printed model of the valve cover are shown below; the third picture shows a cover with the top machined off, that could be fitted with a plexiglass top.  I will post pictures of the prototypes as soon as I have them.  More information is available on page 8 of the forum thread listed below.  Thanks for your interest in these parts - Jay

http://fepower.net/simplemachinesforum/index.php?topic=4481.0

Jack Miller sent me this awesome photo of Scott's Cougar, leaving the line at last year's Drag Week.  Photo credit to some Drag Week participants from Finland:



Hope he'll be there this year; can't wait to see that car again...

The guy I purchased the industrial blocks from also has a bunch of 428 cranks that he wants to get rid of.  These are all marked IUB.  The are all Std/Std, Std/0.010", or 0.010"/0.010".  They all have rust on the journals but look like they will clean up with another 0.010" grind.  He says they have all been magged and are crack-free.   Price will be $175-$200 per crank depending on condition and size.

He wants to sell them as a package of 10 or 12.  If you would be interested in one of these cranks, send me an email (jayb@fepower.net), or give me a call at 952-428-9035, or PM me on this board, post here, whatever.  If I can get enough people who want to buy a total of 10 I will make the purchase and distribute the cranks. I will ship the cranks, but the buyer pays shipping costs.

Let's hear 'em.  I'll start.

When my wife and I got married in 1992, it was clear that her aunt was not fond of me.  Also, she was a notorious re-gifter.  First Christmas after we were married, my mother in law was sick and asked the aunt to pick out a gift for me, from her.  I received a small, dusty Tupperware container.  I'm sure it came out of the back of one of the aunt's kitchen cabinets.  I actually still have that one, use it to soak grease off bolts.  Trying to make the best of the situation.

The next year, from the aunt, I got a CD of harp music.  Obviously she wanted me dead and playing the harp.

Several years later, my wife's grandfather passed away.  He was quite a character, also dressing in the same blue leisure suit and yellow striped tie at any family gathering.  The day after he died the aunt and her husband drove 300 miles and started rooting through his house, grabbing everything in sight.  The next Christmas, I got the dead man's tie!  They buried him in the leisure suit or I would have got that too.

Top that, you guys...

At the PRI show I spoke with at least 5 people who mentioned that they had been trying to get some of the Blue Thunder cast aluminum pentroof valve covers for quite some time, but they were simply unavailable.  I have been thinking about another casting project, and thought that some valve covers similar to the Blue Thunder parts might be a good candidate.  I'm looking for some feedback from the forum to see if there is sufficient interest for me to start a project like this.  Please respond to the poll above if you might be interested in a set of these valve covers.  The valve covers would not have any lettering or markings on them, they would either be plain sand cast valve covers, or the same but with machined fins on the top, kind of like a factory 428CJ valve cover but in the pentroof style.

Also, since I would be CNC machining these myself, I could make options available for different types of oil filler openings if desired, and also machine them with a notch to fit the master cylinder where it may interfere on some vehicles.

This would a pretty quick project, I think, so if I decide to proceed I would probably have the valve covers available in April.

Any comments or suggestions on what to build, or features of the valve covers, are welcome.  Thanks, Jay

One of our forum members has taken the SOHC plunge, and purchased what sounds like an early engine with the non-adjustable rocker arms.  He sent me an email asking about availability of lash caps of various thicknesses, in order to be able to set the lash.  Since I've never used adjustable rockers I'm not much help on this.  I've been told that people buy standard lash caps and grind them to fit on a valve stem tip grinding setup, but depending on the valve stem height, cam base circle, valve seat depth in the head, etc. there is a wide variation in thicknesses that could be required.  In fact, a few years ago at the PRI show, Barry R and I bumped into Ohio George Montgomery, and he told us that he had to use lash caps as thick as 0.280"!  I don't even know where you'd get a lash cap that thick as a starting point.  Can anybody shed some light on this issue of acquiring lash caps in various thicknesses?  Barry, I know you've had to do this before...

Another potential issue is the factory rockers, which use a roller wheel that is crowned in the middle; as I understand it, this was done to work properly with the cast iron cams used in the original SOHC engines.  Again I have never used the factory SOHC rockers, so I wonder how these crowned roller wheels would hold up on a new billet cam, like the ones available from Comp.  The T&D rockers that I use don't have a crowned roller wheel, so that is not an issue with the aftermarket parts.

Any information on this is appreciated - Jay

I'm writing this after the fact of course, but Day 5 was interesting regardless so I thought I'd put up a quick post.  Right after I made my last post, at around 11:00 AM on Friday morning, Steve and I left the hotel and went out to the car to drive to the track.  I started the car, and heard a definite knocking coming from under the hood.  Crap, another rocker arm?  The engine had sounded perfect when we shut it off on Thursday night.

I decided we couldn't risk a drive to the track, and there was a little shade at the hotel anyway, so I pulled the car up into the shade and pulled the valve covers.  Everything looked fine; what a relief.  I put in new plugs as long as the engine was apart, and then bolted it all back together.  The noise was still there when the engine fired up, but it quieted down by the time we drove to the track; we concluded it was an exhaust leak that was misleading us on the noise.

At the track they had decided to run the street eliminator cars first, so despite being a little late we still had plenty of time to get the car into race trim.  Once it was ready to go I spent some time looking at the other cars, and talking to some of the competitors.  Curt Johnson and I chatted for a while; Curt is now the only six time class winner at Drag Week, after his first place finish in BB/NA this week.  Curt's engine is 15:1 compression, and he runs race fuel between the tracks; he says if he doesn't he blows the rings out of the motor in short order.  Brad Dyer, who finished first in my class, is doing the same thing.  I guess my 13:1 motor is just not cutting edge LOL!

After a while they called the class cars, and I got into the staging lanes.  One local bracket racer that we talked to said that the air at the track was the worst he'd ever seen, and the times seemed to reflect that.  There were also lots of traction issues.  When I finally got to the line I did the normal burnout, and left at 4000 RPM.  The car spun and went hard right off the starting line; it has never done that before.  Then, as I tried to correct, the car quit for some reason.  My first thought was that the fuel pump gremlin that got me at last year's third race was back.  I coasted the car to a stop, put it in park, and it fired right up, so I drove down the track.  I went right around back into the staging lanes, popped the trunk lid, and checked the wires going into the fuel pump controller.  But they were tight; that was definitely not the problem.  After some consideration the only thing I could think of was that when I was cranking the steering wheel around I accidentally hit the trans brake button, and that locked up the trans and engine and shut off the car.  I hope that's not what happened, but it might be.  In any case, though, this time I was worried about how the car would run down the track on the next pass.  Would it quit again?  Would I get some decent traction and be able to make a reasonable pass?  I had a nice cushion on the guy in third place, but I needed to make at least a decent pass to ensure that I held onto second place.

Finally I got around to the starting line again, after a few more delays.  Somebody told me that right after my last pass they had stopped the racing and re-prepped the track, so I was hopeful that the car would hook this time.  After the burnout I rolled into the beams and lit the pre stage and stage lights.  I had decided to keep the trans brake off this time, just in case I had hit the brake last time and caused the car to shut off.  So, I footbraked at the line for the first time at this event, and naturally before the tree came down the car slipped forward out of the beams.  I left as soon as that happened, before the tree came down, so I didn't get a time for the pass.  But the car left straight and shifted normally, so it seemed that the first pass didn't do any damage.

Two passes and no results meant that I had to go back into the staging lanes again.  My third pass was marred again by another screw-up; this time the car left fine, but I still had my hand on the shifter after the 1-2 shift, and it inadvertently slipped into neutral at around 1000 feet.  I pulled it back into second as the engine hit the rev limiter, but that hurt the time a little; I ran 9.22 on that pass.  But, that was clearly going to be good enough for second place, so I pulled back into the pits and called it a Drag Week.  No way I was going to catch Brad Dyer, and the guy in third wasn't going to catch me.

Speaking of Brad, I bumped into him at the timing tower just before handing in my slip and we got a chance to talk for a while.  He has had a really tough year, with back surgery, his best friend moving to Florida, and a divorce.  He really stepped it up this year to get his car to run as fast as it does, and he deserved the win.  I was happy for him, and I hope I get to race with him again next year.

Reading through the messages I noticed a couple of comments about the black smoke from my car when it leaves.  It is just running rich at the starting line before I give it wide open throttle; I haven't got the EFI system dialed in there yet.  I also got a kick out of Hot Rod's coverage of my cam change, where they said I had failed "lifters"; I'd been trying to hunt down Freiburger during the week to give him a hard time about saying that over the PA, and then to my surprise it also showed up on the Hot Rod website!  I guess they are mostly just writers and announcers these days LOL!

Overall I was pretty happy with the reliability of the car this year.  Last year at Drag Week I had to replace a starter, wiring for the water pump and a crank sensor, an O-ring for the fuel injectors, a fuel pump, and a rocker arm.  This year the rocker and cam swap was the only issue, and I was able to do that at the track, which is a heck of a lot easier than trying to do it at the side of the road.  My electronics box, which cleaned up the rats nest of wiring under the dash of the car, seemed to perform flawlessly.  The RobbMc starter, which was one of two that gave up on me last year, performed perfectly all week, despite start after start in the staging lanes; the new stronger sprag in those starters seems to have solved their reliability problems.  The big issue on the SOHC remains the rocker arms, and as long as you treat them like the old roller lifters, before the pin oiling feature became available, I think they are fine.  But if you have to deal with an extended idling time, like I did during the drive on Tuesday, where those needle bearings don't get oil splash, I think you are asking for trouble with those rockers.  (By the way, I also was asked at the track why I don't use some kind of spray bar on the needle bearings to keep them lubed during idling time.  I suppose that may be possible, but there isn't a direct shot where you can spray oil on the needles, because of the design of those rockers.  So I think an internal EDM hole, like the pin-oiled roller lifters use, would be a much better solution.)  I was planning a higher ratio version of those rockers a few years ago, and I need to get that project on the front burner, and add the pin oiling feature to help those needle bearings in the roller wheel live.

The big disappointment this year was how the car left the starting line.  The change from 4.29 to 4.11 gears really seemed to hurt the car.  It did what I wanted from a MPH perspective, because MPH was up 2-3 this year, and I was only running 7400 RPM through the lights.  But my 60 foot times were up by a half tenth, and the car just didn't feel as strong as last year.  I need to go back to deeper gears, and either add the Gear Vendors overdrive back into the driveline, or change to a 3 speed transmission. 

One other comment is that as Drag Weeks go, the start and finish at National Trail was not a good thing, and the registration line on Sunday was the worst I'd ever seen.  That, plus the truly bad directions on the Monday drive, made this year's Drag Week feel less well organized than it was in the past.  But it was still worth the trip, and I'm still going back next year 

Here's a picture of the guys in our group at the end of the day Friday.  Left to right is Steve, me, Jeff, Joel, and Kevin.  We sure had a fun week, and thanks to everyone on the forum for following along and supporting our effort!

(Check the previous post for the update on days 1 and 2:  http://fepower.net/simplemachinesforum/index.php?topic=4259.0)

Wednesday morning we had a 25 mile drive to the track, so we were out of the hotel by 7:00 for the quick trip.  For some reason I felt better on Wednesday morning than I had all week; maybe passing out at the restaurant the night before had done me some good LOL!  In any case, Steve and I got on the road to the track, and both of us noticed about halfway through the drive that the engine sounded different.  I wasn't hearing well because of the cold in my head, but even I could hear that something wasn't right.  We decided that we would pull the valve covers when we got into the track and check everything out.

On the way up, we saw Jeff Lutz' Camaro on the side of the road.  Jeff was leading all competitors at Drag Week, running in the 6.10-6.20 range with that car, but it looked like he had some serious suspension or chassis problem because there were big black tire streaks leading up to him at the side of the road. 

The weather was quite overcast, and as we pulled into the pits it began to rain just a little bit.  This turned out to be a blessing in disguise for us, because it turned out we needed the time for repairs.  After the rain let up Steve and I pulled the valve covers and found a real mess.  We had burned up one rocker on each side of the engine, and that rocker had taken out its respective camshaft.  Crap, we needed to replace both cams!

The rockers were #8 intake and #3 exhaust, seemingly random failures.  Later while thinking about this I figured that the long wait idling in the line to get on the freeway on Tuesday probably hurt the rockers.  The SOHC rocker arms have needle bearings in the roller wheel, and when those things give up, they get ground away to nothing and the lash opens up, and the roller wheel starts banging on the cam.  They do not have constant oiling like the pin oiling lifters that are available now; they rely on splash oiling.  Plus because of the design of the rockers it is difficult to get a squirt of oil in there towards the needles, so squirters on each rocker are probably not practical.  What is needed is an SOHC rocker that provides the pin oiling feature, just like a modern roller lifter.  Back in the day, before the pin oiling feature was available, I used to run roller lifters and we would be sure to rev the engine periodically at idle, to make sure there was plenty of oil splash available to oil the needle bearings.  But while I was waiting in line on Tuesday at the freeway entrance, the engine was very close to overheating, so I didn't want to keep revving the engine.  I was pretty sure that wait in line at idle had cost me.

Nothing to do but change out the parts.  I had a spare set of cams, and a bunch of spare rocker arms, so Steve and I got to work making the change.  The big concern was getting the cams timed correctly, but I had done that a few times ( ), and I had thought to bring my dial indicate with me, so it was not a big deal.  It took us about 2-1/2 hours, start to finish, to change the cams and reassemble the valve train with two new rockers.  After we got it torn down, Steve went fishing in the valvetrain area for shrapnel, and got this:



After fishing as much of this out as possible, we got the engine back together.  Unfortunately, after the work was nearly done, I started spinning all the roller wheels on the rocker arms, and found one other one that was questionable.  I decided we would run down the track with that one, then tear down the right side of the engine afterward to replace it before the drive.  Should have been checking all those as we went along, but in the rush to get this done I didn't think to do it until after most of the valvetrain was back together.

While I was working on the repair, Elana Scherr from Hot Rod came by and did a quick interview with me.  I haven't seen that one, or the one I did with Thom Taylor on Tuesday at Norwalk.  If anyone can post links with the time of the interviews for me so I could watch them, I'd appreciate it.

While we were working on the car, all the class cars ran, then the street machine eliminator cars ran for a while.  We were ready to run by the end of the street machine eliminator session, and I wanted to get a run in quickly, since I still had to replace another rocker before the drive.  I got to the line and made my usual pass, and ran a 9.10 @ 149.  Seemed like the car had lost a tenth with the cam change, which was entirely possible; maybe the cam timing was off somewhat, or maybe the lash was a little loose, whatever.  I was just happy that the car ran well down the track, and I could solidfy my hold on second place in the class.

Back in the pits I took a little time to relax; it had been a stressful day so far.  After a half hour or so I dug into the right side valve cover and changed the suspect rocker (#3 on the intake side), while Steve got the car ready for the road.  We had also taken the time earlier to try to address the oil leak issues up in the left front corner of the car, and it turned out that most of the leaking was coming from the oil filter; apparently the gasket was not sealing up well with the adapter.  We changed the filter and that resolved the issue.

By this time it was about 4:00, and we needed to get on the road again.  I turned in my time slip and got the directions to the next track.  Jeff was riding with me again on Wednesday, so we took off with Joel and Kevin in pursuit.  I noticed right away that I was down on oil pressure, compared to the previous drives.  With the engine up to temperature at 2500 RPM, the dry sump pump had been giving me 37-38 psi.  Now it was giving about six pounds less, 31-32.  But it was stable, and also this was the same pressure that I ran with last year, so I wasn't overly concerned.

Comparatively speaking, this drive was even easier than the previous one, and there were no long lines in traffic to deal with.  Joel sent us off on one wrong turn, but we got that figured out pretty quickly.  We also took a second wrong turn later in the drive, but Jeff's smartphone got us back on track.  At this point I'm thinking a smart phone with Google Maps is an essential tool for Drag Week.

On the way we ran along next to some pretty cool folks.  Three time NHRA Top Fuel champion Larry Dixon is participating in Drag Week this year, driving his Nova which he has had since high school.  Here's a shot of him going down the road in front of us:




We also bumped into Mike Roy, a long time Drag Week competitor in the Pro Street Power Adder class, at this gas station in his Monte Carlo.  Mike ran a 7.67 on Wednesday:



Here's a couple of pictures showing Wednesday's checkpoints.  The first checkpoint was a restored Mobil gas station, with an old Galaxie police car in the parking lot!  Bet there's an FE under that hood...








We got into our hotel in Indy around 10:00.  Kevin, Steve and I ordered a pizza from Dominos while I spent a little time updating my blog post.  I hit the sack looking forward to going back to the historic Indy track on Thursday - Jay