Mopar Muscle Association UK

as i pulled up from a spin in the charger tonight, a ticking/tapping noise suddenly developed on the left bank of cylinders.
i am pretty confident it is not exhaust blow, but sounds very much like the tappets need adjusting. the thing is i know that they are standard hydraulic tappets. how reliable are they and is this a common thing to happen, is there any adjustment anyway? if it is the tappets woill the noise dissapear after the engine has cooled and restarted?
it is starting to concern me!!
thanks

I had a tapping coming home from Shakey the other year. After stopping for petrol the tapping went away. (Obviously NOT petrol related .)

Sometimes you can get the odd hydraulic tappet ticking. Sometimes it is muck in the lifters. Sometimes it is poor oil pressure caused by too thin a grade oil when the engine is hot.

But 90% of the time it is the exhaust gasket blowing (cast manifolds) or 99.99% of the time if you run headers.

I will mark you down as a confident man indeed if you can tell it is not the manifold gasket without taking it off and looking at it.

Sticky lifters is a good one. I have had that one before.

You can take them out and clean them quite easily. Probly best to get tome exhaust gaskets and a good dollop of exhaust assembly paste and replace one / both of them first to eliminate them from your suspicions. If the ticking is still there,, rocker covers off, loosen off rocker shaft, pushrods out, inlet manifold and valley pan gasket off, and hey presto, instant access to lifters. Take em out, take em apart (just a spring retainer that holds a sprung cup in the lifter body) clean them with brake cleaner to get crud out, poke out oil ways to open them out, prime with oil, reassemble, and put top end back together. This assumes of couse, you dont want to buy new ones.

One thing I will say, whatever you do, keep an ear out for the ticking all the time before you actually cure it, and listen for it in case it changes from a tick tick to some other nastier noise. I have experience of this.
Lifter cleaning can be very theraputic

1 thing if you take the lifters out to clean them be sure you put them back in the same hole they came out of IE dont mix them up.

it is fitted with headers, and i done the gaskets the night before with lashings of high temp silicone!!!

Unless you are using soft ally or copper header gaskets with NO sealer it will blow and may be blowing already.

If it really a tappet ticking cleaning them sometimes helps but I have had one in the past (when I had a stock valvetrain) that just kept doing it now and again no matter what I did.

If you find you are looking for some good header gaskets try the ones made by Percy's Performance. You can get them through Summit. I have had NO problems with these despite hedman headers and multiple head removals.

i contacted sumit last christmas time, they told me they didn`t do the soft ally/copper gaskets for a 440?!

make sure the mating faces are flat and dont over tighten or it'll blow no matter what kind of gaskets are in there

Heres a stupid question if ever there was one.

What do you mean by "over tighten" jon?

I know graunching them right up is bad, but do you have a torque setting in yer head?


Dave,

are the gaskets that come in the Fel Pro engine gaskit kit ok, or would you still go for the Percy's? I have Hedmans too, and will be keeping them till I get new exhausts, will be going back to stock cast iron at that point.

Actually yeah but thats come with 17 years of engineering, and 13 years of running big block mopars with headers, a lot of people keep swinging on the things and it only makes things worse, there is a torque for the things but I challenge you to get a torque wrench in there, if you have to keep swinging on it somethings not flat

Not sure what those fel-pro gaskets are like but the soft multi layer ones like Percy's are really good. The header flange sinks right into them and unlike "cardboard" type header gaskets they will not blow.

Summit not have gaskets for 440s? You must have been talking to some thick chevy owner.

http://store.summitracing.com/partdetai ... toview=sku

On the "how tight is tight" front.

I use a 3/8" combo spanner that is about 5.5" long. I take all the bolts down nice and even working from the center out a bit at a time until I cannot get them any tighter by pushing on the end of the spanner with my thumb. When the pain of the spanner digging into my thumb REALLY hurts I know that is tight enough.

I then check them for tightness after the engine has been run the first time and every few weeks after that.

And as Jon says make sure the header flange is actually flat. Far to many are sent out twisted or uneven.

You just can't get the staff these days.

The Fel Pro gaskets I have are like a perforated tin mated to cardboardy-type material (which I know it is ulikey to be because it burns). When the Headers were fitted by RPM, Martin advised I use two gaskets on each side.

I am thinking that I will fit the headers and get starter pinned to block before putting engine in. Getting them out with the engine in place was the devils own job. At least that way I can get a good purchase on the nuts and not have to risk my paintwork in the process.

As for your

When the pain of the spanner digging into my thumb REALLY hurts I know that is tight enough

approach Dave, remember I am from the south, so I wont be able to get them any where near tight.

Oh and Sean, if you do need to take your lifters out and want to try using them again, take two and rub the bases together to check for flatness. If they rock rather than sit perfectly sqquare, you an always use them as wheels for a mouse - size model flintstones car. They will be classed as FUBAR