I just bought a 1958 F600 with 50,000 miles on it. The truck had not run in 4 years so I drained the old gas out of the tank and rebuilt the carb. The engine fired right up but I could hear a lot of valve noise. When I pulled the left valve cover everything looked pretty normal. The right side was a different story- there were only 3 pushrods in place. I pulled the rocker shafts off and found the #1 exhaust rocker arm extremely loose on the shaft. I pulled it off and the hole is worn oblong. I went ahead and pulled the manifold and valley cover and found the pushrods in there. 2 of them are broken and one of the broken pieces (about 2" long) is missing. Could it have fallen down into the oil pan? There is a mixture of small and large diameter pushrods.

I can run a wire down into the oil feed hole in each of the heads about 4" and then it hits something solid like the head gasket. Should the wire be able to go all the way to the camshaft? I have cranked the engine over with the spark plugs removed and there is no oil coming out of the rocker arm feed holes. The oil pressure light goes out when cranking.

What should I do now- go ahead and pull the heads or replace the rocker arms and pushrods and see what happens? 

Thanks for the help,

Alan 

You can't go straight to the cam because there an offset groove in the head that steps over to the feed hole from the cam. You might be able to remove the rocker shafts and pressure feed some solvent into the head to clear the passage. I'm sure others here will have some more input on this . Sounds like you will need another set of rocker shafts and a proper set of matched push rods. You might also be able to block off the left side feed on top off the head and crank it over, pressure might clear the blockage on the right. Remove the push rods when you do that.

The broken pushrods may be a sympton of stuck valves.  Did they all pop up when you removed the rockers?  Lack of oil to the rockers can be caused by a worn cam bearing, insufficient oil pressure (the light will go out at around 10 psi), or plugged oil passages.

John - "The Hoosier Hurricane"

Yes, all of the valves popped up when the rockers were removed.

I filled the oil feed hole in the head with PB Blaster and it drains out quickly.

I used a blow gun with a rubber tip to pressurize the oil feed on each side while I was cranking the engine. Doing this caused oil to blow out the oil feed hole on the opposite side. It does not blow oil out if I don't crank the engine.

Is this telling me anything?

what this tells you is that you may not have a grooved cam but a drilled so it has to rotate the camshaft for you to be able to get pressure up.

If it aint broke, lets modify it!

1962 Galaxie 500 Town Victoria 4dr. 292 with a nice mild cam.

Salinas California.

It probably has a cross drilled camshaft, so the oil supply to the rockers will be intermittent.  Most likely you will have oil to the rockers when you run it, since you can blow into the oil supply holes and they blow out somewhere.  The rockers don't require a lot of oil.  If oil comes out the overflow tubes when it's running, that means the shafts are full and there is sufficient oil.

John - "The Hoosier Hurricane"

The drilled cam sounds reasonable because when I was applying air pressure in each oil feed hole the oil was spurting (as opposed to a solid stream) out the opposite hole.

However, when I crank the engine without applying air pressure  no oil is pumped out of the feed holes in the heads. The starter is turning the engine at what I would guess to be 100-200 RPM. Is that not fast enough to pump oil up to the rockers? In other words does the engine have to be turning at idle speed (500 RPM) to get oil pumped up to the rockers?  

Now that you've put penetrating oil in & blown air thru the oil supply holes, how about manually lubing the rocker assembly, & then starting the engine again for a few of minutes to see if you have cleared the problem. (this assumes you have reinstalled pushrods of course)

Paul

By blowing air in,  the pump may have lost it's prime, but it should pick up again. You could turn the motor by hand to place the cam cross hole at the point of feed and use a pump oil can to put some oil back in the system. A temporary mechanical oil gauge rigged up could give you a better idea of what's happening.