Hemi 331 First Time Start up...

First Time start up on a Fresh Hemi 331 I notice there is not much oil in the top end at Idle with valve covers off with 70 lbs of pressure. Being the first one I am not sure how much oil I should see?? thanks pk

 

Hey man! Don't worry just yet. You will see very little oil coming from the rockers. You will never see "gushing". You will see something more like "bleeding", for lack of a better description. Check around the ends of the rocker arms where there are oil holes, and at the base of the rocker arms where there are oil holes. You need to make sure you give it enough time to fill up the rocker shafts, but you don't want to burn it up, so just be careful. I turned mine over with the starter WHILE priming the engine (turning the oil pump with a drill) and that seemed to work well. Gets that starter pretty hot though. Just be careful.

Again though, you want see a ton of oil. If you see a lot of oil you may have something wrong.

Did you rebuild the rockers? Clean them out? Anything, before getting to this stage?

 

It's an old story with the hemi. And one thing to remember is Never rev the guts out of a cold Hemi because you WILL destroy the rocker shafts because the cold thick oil will not have reached the shafts .
Because i ran roller lifters i blocked each oil hole in the lifter bores with screw in plug which i had drilled out with a .050 drill. This reduced the amount of oil the lifters got ( they don't need much being solid) but increased the volume to the rocker gear. Fixed two problems at once.