You are looking at brand new pushrods with about 30 minutes of idle time on them. Was this wear caused by the rockers being too loose? It's clearly rubbing on the guides, but I'm not understanding what I did wrong. The only issue I had was the rockers had loosened up on the passenger's side by the time I finished adjusting the driver's side. I noticed some of the nuts on the rockers were kind of loose when I put them on. I used new rockers, nuts and rods on everything. In the second photo, I've replaced all the intake rods (they were the only ones with the scoring) did the cold lash and made sure the rods are in the center of the guide with a feeler gauge. Once it was all tight, I went along an put a crimp nut on top, but I noticed that on some of the studs, I could install the crimp nut with my fingers all the way down to the rocker nut. That doesn't seem right, and it doesn't seem like it's going to prevent that nut from backing out again.
So here's my questions: Can the threads on those rocker studs wear to the point the nuts won't be tight enough to hold? They aren't backing out, the nuts just aren't tight, even the prevailing torque nuts are only finger tight on many of them. And second, is that wear on the rods typical of a loose rocker? By the time I got back over to the passenger's side, there were several rockers that were already loose and I could hear the valves.
Replace the studs? Get Polylocks for the rockers? Or is it something I'm not doing right? Unless I'm way off, the old rocker nuts are actually tighter than the new ones that came with the rockers.
