I figured out the problem. Because I had no manifolds on, it was hard to localize where the air ws leaking out during the leakdown test last night. But tonight I used a couple feet of 1/4" hose as a stethoscope. The air is coming out of the valves. It never had anything to do with head bolts nor head gaskets.
Road Atlanta entry list
jlevie
#42
Have you double or triple checked the cam timing? If the cam isn’t correctly timed you could have bogus leak down numbers because the valves aren’t closed when each piston is at TDC on the compression stroke.
Ranger
#43
jlevie wrote:
The timing is right. To play around with the variables and isolate the cause of the problem I put a cylinder’s valve adjuster eccentrics at full loose so there’d be no way that tight eccentrics could be to blam. I also played around with the crank/cam position. The only way I could get behavior to change was when I rotated the crank/cam so much that a lobe started lifting a rocker.
This is good news. If I understand a problem I can fix it. Not understanding what was causing the leakdown failure was making me cranky.