Jan,
Every Rootes head Ive ever seen has a brass gooseneck with a very loose fitting
to the rocker shafts.
The rocker shafts themselves have a machined inverted conical surface that
begs to have an o-ring betwicksed the gooseneck and the shafts, so you dont
need to cut anything, just put some high temp orings in and you are done.
I had a sudden and measureable drop in idle oil pressure some years back
and pulling the rocker cover revealed much of the rocker oil supply
was bleeding out of split rubber seals at the gooseneck. I figured the
seals were an improvisation to what should have been there.
$1, a trip to pep-boys and 20 minutes to pull the towers resulted in
a gain of 7 PSI at idle (19 from 12).
Ever since this, I have always put o-rings on the towers stock or not...
Jarrid Gross
-----Original Message-----
From: jumpinjan [mailto:jservaites@woh.rr.com]
Sent: Friday, September 12, 2003 6:11 PM
To: Jarrid Gross
Cc: alpines@autox.team.net
Subject: Re: Oil pressure
Jarrid Gross wrote:
>
> Steven,
>
> There are two other common sources of oil loss on rootes engines.
>
> 1) One is the brass coupler to the rocker shafts. There are
> supposed to be some orings that seal the shafts to the coulpler.
Jarrid,
I have never seen any o-rings installed (not a bad idea to cut some
grooves for some) and I just checked the Rootes part manual and didn't
see any listed. The 1600s & 1725s that I rebuilt never seem to need them
and oil pressure is way up there. One point to make on the rockers is to
clean the oil holes, both the adjusting screw hole and the oil hole on
top. They are pretty small in diameter and they do get plugged with
carbon. Check the oil holes in the rocker shafts too. Make sure all that
stuff is clean. Most rebuilders throw in some rings & bearings and never
touch the rocker shaft assemblies at all.
I had a customer's 1725 that had low oil pressure and I found that
someone had installed the oil filter base gasket on backwards. Once a
new gasket was installed correctly, oil pressure was back to normal.
The Alpine engine is a simple design, but the rebuilder MUST look at all
the small details.
Jan
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