noob valve spring question

PRH said
I didn’t read through it again to see if this was discussed.......
Have you done a compression test?
Does it seem higher than you’d expect?

No, at least not that I recall. I'll see if I can find the time this afternoon, but we're leaving for vacation tomorrow, so if I can't get to it, it may be a little while.

PRH said
I know of three builds that all had the “it won’t rev over 4000” type of symptom....... where it ended up being the cam was installed wrong.
All three had the cam installed with the bottom keyway straight up, and the upper gear dot straight down.
That arrangement will have the cam advanced 2 1/2 teeth..... which is about 35*....... and the motor will run into a wall from 4000-4500.
In all three of these cases the car drove around fine until you tried to get it to rev..... and one of them had been being run like that for a couple of years.

Now that's interesting. I guess the only way to confirm that is to pull the timing cover?

Honestly nothing that the previous owner did to this car would surprise me anymore. This past winter I thought I'd tackle the badly leaking exhaust headers. Thought I could unbolt them and slide them back just enough to swap gaskets, without having to get into more involved tear down due to the clearance issues. What I found was a gasket that obviously wasn't what I expected to come with a cheap set of headers. It's a layered aluminum gasket. So he had tried to correct it and wasn't successful. Then I saw the problem. He didn't know that he had to plug up the air injection ports. You could see the carbon all over the bottom of the gasket.

It was just blowing exhaust right out of the heads

Of course getting a tap and handle in there required a lot more room, so it became a much bigger project. Good times. But yeah, installing the cam wrong would be par for the course. I'll checking into that.