Just started 350/290hp crate motor have ?'s

[Greubin]

Originally Posted by 1970 CST Short Wide

We have one of these motors in my sons truck. It started useing oil , ~4 qts in 2000 miles. It turned out a couple of the guides were bad. The shop that fixed it said the guides were to long and were hitting the retainer which ruined the seals, could this be your noise????

Interesting - I noticed I have a little bit of smoke coming out of the exhaust, but thought it would be normal for a new engine to do that during the break in period. I checked the rocker covers for noise, seemed farily quiet, I could hear the valve train working, but nothing abnormal.

I stopped by the local machine shop for another project and had the mech listen to my noisy engine. He seemed to think it was piston slap, and said the crate engines normally run "a little loose" and are noisy. Dunno - jusry is still out on this...

Thanks for the replies.