Spark plug diagnosing help, please!

Now to figure out why it looks that way.
Do the piston match the cylinders in color?
Is the honing still present in some cylinders and not others?
Would be a good time to dig out the dial indicator and micrometers and check cam lobes. I would check with lifters in and then without.
Checking cam and balancer alignment at this point should be pretty straight forward as you can now see the pistons.

After seeing the rest of the pictures striaght edge the block. There are cylinders that look steam cleaned by looking at the head photos. Guess there was no indications of head gasket leakage!

mopar 3 B said:

After seeing the rest of the pictures striaght edge the block. There are cylinders that look steam cleaned by looking at the head photos. Guess there was no indications of head gasket leakage!

Click to expand...

Never really considered head gaskets, no. When I did a compression test a little while back, it was remarkable how close all the cylinders were - they were all within a pound or two of each other (@ 130psi or so).
Never had any of the telltale signs of head gasket issues - no overheating, no coolant in oil or vice-versa and of course, no white smoke out the tailpipes.
No signs of combustion in the coolant, either. She always ran quite cool, actually.

mopar 3 B said:

Now to figure out why it looks that way.
Do the piston match the cylinders in color?
Is the honing still present in some cylinders and not others?
Would be a good time to dig out the dial indicator and micrometers and check cam lobes. I would check with lifters in and then without.
Checking cam and balancer alignment at this point should be pretty straight forward as you can now see the pistons.

Click to expand...

You see what I see. Yes, other than those couple white exhaust valves, pistons look like combustion chamber coloring to me.
No honing present in any cylinder - very shiny and smooth in all bores.
I am seriously doubting any "rebuilding" took place at all, really.

Water injection will make combustion chambers look that way. Just enough water to steam but not enough to hurt anything to much and plugs water foul. Only problem anti-freeze does not make a good lubricant.

moparedtn said:

Welcome to "Ed's mystery motor, post #gazillion".
Those of you who have been following along know this is a mystery 440 in my '68 GTX.
The latest was I installed a mechanical oil pressure gauge; since I've heard some rather scary rattles in the engine a couple times under hard acceleration, I also presumed that the mystery chrome dipstick in this thing might be off and added a quart of oil to what I think was already 5 (stock pan, I think).
When I fired the car up to test the gauge, it warmed up as usual seemed like. I goosed it several times to watch the gauge for operation and then all of a sudden...
it wouldn't idle and ran pretty rough. I had to keep my foot on it to keep it running. Idle dropped from 800RPM to less than 500RPM, like it had dropped a cylinder or skipped timing or something.

As I continued to try to "clear its' throat", it would sometimes seemingly hit on all 8 and smooth out for a moment, then go back into grump mode.
If I held throttle to around 2000RPM, it would grumble grumble grumble hit on all 8 grumble grumble hit on all 8 grumble grumble.
Intermittent, like that.

-Recent compression test showed 130 across the board, give or take a couple pounds (yep, they're all that close).
Previous owner, long deceased, built this engine out of what looks like a '75 block with the original '68's internals. I have pretty much replaced ALL ignition, fuel and cooling systems on this car (and I mean ALL). It also has a newer fairly mild Comp Cams and lifters in it.
Typically, the engine runs well enough and I've put probably 6-700 miles on it since I've gotten it back on the road this summer.

Here's the spark plug pic:
View attachment 352314
They're the usual Champions with just a few hundred miles on them.

I don't see anything to warrant concern here. If there was anything drastically/mechanically wrong, they'd show it, right?
Y'all know a bunch more about this stuff than I do. All I know is right now, after all this work, my baby is a beached whale in prime summer cruising months!
HELP!!

Click to expand...

Not too sure how a post on spark plug condition ended up in damn near a complete engine tear down. Your compression values across the board would indicate a sound assembly as far as rings, gaskets and valves are concerned. Hope you did both a wet and dry compression test as well as a leak down test. There's no sense pissing around with the cam and lifters, their probably Comp garbage and should be tossed for a better combo like Lunati. Do you own a rod length checker by any chance? They're almost a necessity these days,what with people swapping heads of all brands. Do you even know how to use one? What's the clearance at the lifter bores? Again, special tools are needed to determine if the bore is too big for the lifter, or vise versa. And have you checked the end play and float of the cam, it appears as though the one lifter doesn't sit well on the cam lobe.That, and/or a mismatched pushrod length could explain why the rod bent or perhaps the lifter for that valve was garbage to begin with. Do you run stock rockers, roller rockers or any type of adjustable clearance rockers? Are the rods touching on the sides of the head passages?
And above all, if your running OE rockers and rods, is the orientation of the rockers on the rods correct or are the offsets wrong? You seem to be groping in the dark on this one and perhaps a good manual could shed some light on the issue and possibly save you a great amount of time and expense. I wouldn't so much as suggest what the issue with your engine is but I bet a bit of investigation, armed with the specs and procedures contained in a proper manual would reveal the cause and the solution, or, you could along with everyone else, guess at possibilities and never really feel confident that you found the real solution. I honestly think the plugs looked OK although you were running fairly rich on some cylinders. I also think, as far as valve springs go, you should visit Comp's web site, look up the cam and find out what spring tensions are required for that particular cam as well as lift and duration. As much as many of us may like to think, building a sturdy and sound engine is never a "hit and miss" undertaking, rather it's built on proven procedures, parts and specs. Obviously not the doctrine that the last guy subscribe to but hopefully the one you will. Good luck! Hope that thyroid issue turns out better than the engine situtation.

Yatzee said:

Good luck! Hope that thyroid issue turns out better than the engine situtation.

Click to expand...

I started to take your post point by point and answer it, regardless of the sometimes damn near insulting "points" it was making.
It certainly wasn't the type of thing I needed to read today of all days, obviously, so in the end I decided against doing that.
Most of your questions regarding how I got to this point with this engine, as well as the details of said engine (as I discovered them while disassembling it) have already been posted, after all.
They're there for the reading.

In the end, this is going to be a simple piecing together as economically as possible of what is assumed to be a decent bottom end (given the good compression test, good oil pressure and lack of oil consumption), coupled with arrival of a known good set of 906 heads that haven't been machined on at all, just gone through at a known reputable machine shop.
This should allow me to use a new set of stock length pushrods and rockers, since all stock 440's used the same length ones when new.
The 516 heads in the pics above are considered junk and will be disposed of.
The stock intake will be re-used, along with that new Edelbrock AVS.
I'll be using the FelPro PermaTorque head gaskets and Mr Gasket good header gaskets, along with the Mopar Performance intake gasket set I already fetched, along with new ARP intake bolts.
I'm basically putting a stock 440 back together.
It should work; I don't have resources to do anything else at this point, regardless. It costs a lot to keep me alive these days.
That wonderful, expensive, "correct" engine building of which you speak will happen again one day, God willing, just not soon.
I am in part posting all of these trials and tribulations with my "mystery engine" so that they may benefit others in the future, anyways.
There is a decided lack of threads on such low-buck things on this forum; everyone posts of their mega-dollar builds and such and that's great, but some of us are still shadetrees at heart, with accompanying shadtree budgets, too.

BTW, the results of all the biopsies and "fine needle aspirations" and all that painful crap today was that I do not, thank God, have any new cancers right now.
Maybe all that will settle down for a while now, hopefully.
I thank you for your kind wishes in regards to that.

mopar 3 B said:

Water injection will make combustion chambers look that way. Just enough water to steam but not enough to hurt anything to much and plugs water foul. Only problem anti-freeze does not make a good lubricant.

Click to expand...

Yeah, what I'm thinking too. Probably attributed to a leaky head gasket. I hope.

Glad you got some good news at the doc Ed, Always pulling for you buddy. New push rod, new gasket set , bolt that old truck motor back together and run the crap out of it .

By the way, those red springs look just like mine, Mopar performance replacement springs. nothing spectacular but should be fine with magnum repo cam grind or under .480 ect so I have been told.

I didn't see anything majorly wrong looking in those heads from the pics. White valves usually indicate a lean condition, and we know you had a vacuum leak. Shoulda just stuck a pushrod in it and tried it out. I've had pushrods bend from age or whatever before. Had a 318 that had 6 or 7 slightly bent pushrods, I just replaced them with straight ones and it rocked on. I'd stick with the higher compression heads if it was me, but fresh 906's may not be bad either.

At least you got some good news today that has got to take a huge load off the mind. As for the engine you at least know what it is or is not.
Components will be much easier to select in the future.
I would have the 516's checked before just scraping them or if you have the space bag and shelf them for another time.

1967coronet said:

Glad you got some good news at the doc Ed, Always pulling for you buddy. New push rod, new gasket set , bolt that old truck motor back together and run the crap out of it .

By the way, those red springs look just like mine, Mopar performance replacement springs. nothing spectacular but should be fine with magnum repo cam grind or under .480 ect so I have been told.

Click to expand...

I appreciate that more than you know, my friend.
Having been on both sides of things literally more than once, I can attest that being on this side of the daisies is preferable.
I'll confess that a large part of my taking these heads off was wanting to see inside the motor, too. I'm a little tired of wrasslin' this mystery motor, you know.
Been nickel and diming me to death since I started fooling with it.
It's a truly wonderful thing that a mutual friend of ours (Ward T.) has so graciously offered to send me a set of 906's fresh from the machine shop; he truly is doing God's work in this instance. I can never repay his generosity.
I am a little concerned about pushrod length when putting it all back together, but since the heads reportedly haven't been milled and the block sure as heck hasn't obviously, it should be all right I reckon.
Those pistons are so far down in the bores, the thing probably should sound like a Model T when running.
The heads are reported to be on the way. I guess I best get to steppin'!

Force Fed Mopar said:

I didn't see anything majorly wrong looking in those heads from the pics. White valves usually indicate a lean condition, and we know you had a vacuum leak. Shoulda just stuck a pushrod in it and tried it out. I've had pushrods bend from age or whatever before. Had a 318 that had 6 or 7 slightly bent pushrods, I just replaced them with straight ones and it rocked on. I'd stick with the higher compression heads if it was me, but fresh 906's may not be bad either.

Click to expand...

You're probably right on the pushrod; another certain fella has said as much (looking at you, Hemi-Itis ).
I wanted to get a look inside the engine anyways, so...
The exhaust valves look so tiny sitting next to those intakes, eh?
The 906's have the larger exhaust valves and better breathing/porting, of course, but I am giving up closed chambers for opens, too. That's probably something to consider on this obviously low compression block, but hey, it's a step closer to being "authentic" with them on there, right?
Yeah, like it matters on this car....not.
I just want it to run decently and behave. We'll save a REAL build for the next time. Health, money and time are not on my side this time around.

mopar 3 B said:

At least you got some good news today that has got to take a huge load off the mind. As for the engine you at least know what it is or is not.
Components will be much easier to select in the future.
I would have the 516's checked before just scraping them or if you have the space bag and shelf them for another time.

Click to expand...

Amen, brother.
Yep, on the engine, it's now pretty apparent that it was thrown together with whatever the guy had laying around. Quite the mishmash. '65 this, '75 that, etc.
I'll probably just toss the 516's on a shelf and forget about 'em for now unless somebody here wants them hint hint.

moparedtn said:

BTW, the results of all the biopsies and "fine needle aspirations" and all that painful crap today was that I do not, thank God, have any new cancers right now.
Maybe all that will settle down for a while now, hopefully.

Click to expand...

That's for sure good news!!

Cranky said:

That's for sure good news!!

Click to expand...

Thanks, Cranky.

More good news...the heads have arrived!
Grand unveiling will have to wait until tomorrow. I overdid the work thing today.

The 485 heads that would have come on the 75 block were open chamber also. The compression should be no less than 8.2 advertised. Your cam should still work but there maybe better options.

Well, I had enough time this evening to unwrap the heads and give them the once-over. They look really good, at least to me. Freshly machined mounting surfaces, sharp enough on the edges to cut a fella.
Very clean and everything looks damn near new.

Spent about an hour fighting to get the old exhaust studs out of them both, using the old double-nut method. No broken ones.
Got them all wire-wheeled down and ready for a painting.
Of course, in the back of my mind, I'm thinking "I wonder how much they cut them and how long a pushrod I'll need"...
I reckon a pushrod checker is in my immediate future?

If you knew the difference could be made up in head gasket thicknes. For the little in compression incress the head gaskets maybe cheaper than pushrods.

mopar 3 B said:

If you knew the difference could be made up in head gasket thicknes. For the little in compression incress the head gaskets maybe cheaper than pushrods.

Click to expand...

An added "benefit" to using the FelPro Permatorque gaskets, maybe?