Well i finished the long block this morning. Went to prime the engine with an old distributor shaft and drill like i always have. Now in the 3 years since ive been outta school and builing engines ive never seen this happen. Only the 1-3-5-7 bank had oil coming outta the pushrods onto the rockers. The 2-4-6-8 Bank had NOTHING. I sat there with the drill for a good hour and didnt get ANYTHING . A couple times i got a couple drips of oil outta the exhaust rockers on 2 and 6 but that was it. Any suggestions?

Did you try turning the motor at all?

Gary Anderson

Yup several times. I mean the one bank came up right away, and nothing outta the other....weird. I think im gonna throw a 1/2 drill on it, or just fire it up and hope for the best.

Is the distributor shaft sitting down in the bore properly around the oill passage?

Dist shaft aroudn the oil passage? huh? Dude the dist shaft fits around the oil pump shaft. And yes its aorudn it and ye sim showing 50psi on my mech gauge.

Are you using just a distributor shaft, or do you have the shaft housing too? The oil passage to the right bank goes through the distributor bore, without anything there, oil will just drain back down to the pan.

I was just using a shaft, hahaha ive never used a housing before but damn it makes sense. I wonder why ive never ran into this problem before.

you know what I find works real good, a compressed air tank like the ones used to spray pesticides on weeds and stuff. I have one that looks just like a propane tank but the top comes off and I fill it with 7 qts of oil. I then seal the top and pump it up. There is a hose with a trigger on it and I connect the end of the hose to the hole on the back of the block(rear china wall) once I hit the trigger, the oil is compressed into the block and you can actually hear the air being displaced out. It takes about 3 minutes for oil to come shooting out of the rocker areas.

I remember reading in poip hotrodding or car craft that there is a pipe plug in teh back that needs to be put in otherwise one bank of cylinders willnot get oil. Poncho blocks are the same. I gotta see if I stillhave that issue, it was on street combos for 9.5:1 compression.

Waas you block hot tanked or machined any??????

Yeah it was machined and hot tanked. I stuck an old housing in minus the drive gear and it primed perfectly.