Thread: V8 valve springs

Thats a buggar about the spring...

The not-so-funny thing is,, when I was thinking of buying the BSL I got a friend to check its history and it appeared to have had a replacement crank (!!!!) fitted during warranty, I talked to JC about this and his advice was STEER CLEAR!!

see what happens when you think you know more than God??

I broke a valve spring in a Rover V8 it was within 2000 ks of replacing the Camshaft (with a different lift)
Scrapped the engine at 180000 ks with broken valve spring and worn bottom end.

Pedro,
Curious about the lump of goo in your inlet branch + recent head gasket (so also inlet manifold gasket) renewal. Guessing you do all your own work pretty carefully. In a couple of V8 rebuilds I've had trouble with inlet gasket sealing especially after head machining and just wondering if there's any coolant weeping into that cylinder and creating hydraulic hammering. Guess the goo would be creamy if water and oil mixing. Is the combustion chamber steam cleaned? What do the underside of valve heads look like on camera? Compression on that cylinder?
Or do the "she'll be right" and just replace the valve spring?

Thanks Pedro. Yes mine had a new higher lift cam...Crowe stage 2 when head gaskets were done. New timing gear and tappets too, so it was done properly. Heads cleaned up and new seats but I doubt valve springs were new...so now at 260,000 I will just replace the spring and see what happens, although replacing all springs with a good new set of double valve springs might be a better idea as I like to rev her hard and compression brake with the manual trans. The bores and bearings etc should have a LOT more life in them and she did go hard.

Cheers

Why not have a look on the internet at the USA high performance shops? A lot of work was done on valve springs over there in the 50's through 70's after Meyer and Drake were able to attribute a lot of engine failures on race cars to broken bits of valve gear getting tangled in the works.

When I had the heads checked for the 4.6, after discussion about intended usage, the only change was new valve springs.
less than 120K and he didnt trust them,,