318 just started knocking???
thought about doing this myself bonds! do u have to take the rocker shaft off i worked on a golf cart engine and removing the pushrods i could pull the rocker arm up and pull the rod out. could i not do the same one by one on my 318?
Yeah, it can stay on, but not tight. It's not worth keeping in place and it's extremely easy to remove the shaft, the bolts and spacer washers under the bolt heads in one deal. If you just grab them by the front and back end with the bolts completely unthreaded, pull them straight up and off, let the rockers rotate upsideown and put them in the valve cover, to the side as you work.
There is no way you could safely move the rocker arm without prying on something you shouldn't.
They are five bolts that need loosened and tightened by hand, in a sequence. It takes less than two minutes to undo them. Putting them back on by letting the longer valve side of the rocker arm simply use the top of the valve spring retainer to guid all 8 rockers back into place, upright and plop the bolts back in the holes.
Golden Scamp,
you could buy a cheap, automotive stethascope. They work extremely well for finding the source of a knock.
If you don't find any bent pushrods, you could put the system back together, button it up and take the stethascope to the sheetmetal parts first.
If you hear something from the top end of the oil pan with the wand, it could be a rod or main bearing that is spun. Don't give it a lot of RPM. Just diagnose it from idle.
If it sounds like a pushrod, but you don't find anything, it could be a trashed lifter or camshaft.
The stethascope is an easy and cheap way to determine if you need to do some major overhauling.
One other thing that hasn't been mentioned is checking your oil for damage.
Metal will not show on a dipstick. It falls to the bottom of the pan and into any low areas of the engine, like down in the lifter galley up top, in pockets in the cylinder head, etc. If you did hurt the cam, you will see some of it in the filter element.
If you are up to the task, you can drain the oil, remove the filter, stab it and cut it open with tin snips. The element will be dark with carbon, but you should be able to see some metal. If you use a magnet and pick anything up from the filter, it could very well be a flattened cam lobe and trashed lifter.
If you see metal flakes that are lighter in color and the magnet doesn't pick anything up, it could be a bearing problem, in which case RedFish's suggestion of pulling one wire at a time on the distributor cap, while it's running (wear gloves) will tell you if it's a rod bearing and which one is slapping, every time the engine fires on that cylinder. Removing spark takes load off of that piston and the noise goes away, if it is a bad bearing, rod or journal.
