Valve stem wear pattern on stock stamped rockers ?

[at_the_junkyard]

Just wondering what I should typically see for a valve stem wear pattern when using the stock stamped pedestal rockers ? Its on a pair of E7 heads with stock HO cam ?

I've been chasing a slight tick lately so I tried the sharpie on the valve stem trick (same as for a roller rocker) and actually run the engine for a bit. Shut it down and pulled off the rocker pair and found all the ink was cleaned off except for about 1/4 of the valve stem towards the intake (top) side.

I have pulled all the rockers and push rods previously and no real obvious signs of problems. The pre-load is set to about 3/4 of a turn which should be decent. Not sure, maybe its a lifter starting to go ? all else looks OK to me.

Any comments/suggestions ?

Thanks in advance.

[erratic50]

When you had it apart did you check the pushrods to confirm they are straight?

I had a lifter making noise on my 86GT when it had around 250K miles. I treated it with a deudge for starters, even though I always changed it religiously and had kept it on a steady diet of mobile 10W40 which is notoriously high detergent... I did that because the dunce that owned it before me always ran penns which it sludge in a bottle in the scheme of things and I figured if anything broke loose and got lodged somewhere it might help.

After the 10 min at idle with desludge I did an FLA1 filter and fresh oil mobile 10W40, but this time I kept out a quart. I dumped in a pint of Slick50 straight into the oil filter then 12 oz of a treatment - I think it was marvel mystery oil. (Note the engine ended up 1c low as these additives like to foam and I didn’t want windage induced bearing knock to try to diagnose around). The other 4 oz went into a 1/4 tank of gas.

I fired the motor and let it idle. The moment oil pressure came up the tick I was hearing silenced. For the most part I haven’t heard it since, except on a few extremely cold mornings.

I do hear a little noise in it again now, but it has nearly 500K miles on it so the treatment did its job for sure.

When I did the intake swap it was basically clean as a whistle inside.

I hope whatever you figure out works for you!

[at_the_junkyard]

Yep rolled all the pushrods on a flat and no issues detected.

I would expect the design of the stamped rocker to contact a large area of the valve stem so thinking the pattern I’m seeing is fine etc but I wanted to ask the question to the forum.

My gut feel right now is maybe a weak lifter as they have some miles but we’ll see. It’s not real worrisome yet but more annoying ☹️