[4eyes]

Hello! This is my first post here.

My girlfriend and I are working on an 84 B2000 we bought cheap with a blown head gasket.
Luckily the head and block are both in good shape and measure nice and flat.

Unfortunately, the inside of the valve cover and the entire rocker assembly were both coated in a lot of sludge. Maybe coking? The head cleaned up nicely but now we're on to the rocker assembly.

I took the assembly apart and was surprised to find what seems to be very old brittle plastic (or rubber) ring inserts inside the ends of the rear rocker shafts. There seem to be three of them, each about 4 or 5mm thick (didn't actually measure), in each shaft. I tried to clean one and it just crumbled in my hand.

I know about the rubber o ring that goes on the center tube and is inset into the middle bearing cap but I have no idea what these other "inserts" would be for. I have seen no mention of them in either of our repair manuals or online.

Does anyone know anything about these inserts?

Sludge:

Nice and clean head:

Rocker assembly disassembled:

Looks like I forgot to take any pictures of the inserts themselves but I can if that'd be helpful.

Thanks in advance for any help,

Sam

 

[4eyes]

Hey C_Ben! Thanks for your reply!

We did not find any suitable replacements for those inserts. They were not included in our Felpro gasket kit (although the O ring was). Nor were we able to find any info regarding them online. They also aren't mentioned in either the Mazda FSM or the Haynes manual we have (and both have exploded diagrams!). It's a bit of a mystery. Glad to hear that you remember them as I thought I may be going a little crazy haha. I assume they are for some sort of oil flow restriction? Since they were in such terrible condition (as mentioned above one crumbled in my hand) and we couldn't find any info on them, we decided to forge ahead and rebuild the rocker assembly without them and hope for the best (luckily we had two sets of hands haha). If you wouldn't mind looking in your microfische catalog to see what you can find, I would be most interested to learn more and I'm sure it would help someone else down the line!

Here are pictures of some of the "inserts":

It almost looks like they were perhaps one piece and separated?

Here's the rocker assembly and cam all cleaned up:

We're from the Oakland CA! Where are you located?

It was the gasket between the #3 and #4 cylinders:

Block all cleaned up:

Since we're in CA, we have to keep the whole emissions system stock for smog purposes. We have talked about registering it out of state so we could do some smog deleting, but that'll most likely happen only if we need emissions parts that we can't get or that are prohibitively expensive.

We'll be working on it this weekend and we've already got most everything back together so hopefully we'll be starting it up tonight or tomorrow!!!