I'm glad you found your problem without having to go into the motor. To elaborate on the problem I had with oil pressure and morel lifters in case someone does have a actual problem caused by the combination of what I once ran, 5 or 6 years ago I built a merlin 2 block using a .612 lift hydraulic roller cam with a std base circle and their (morel) at the time best hyd roller lifter. My motor had low oil pressure idling hot and running below 1000 rpm's,virtually NONE once hot on the dyno. We went ahead and dynoed it anyways then I started some investigating before installing the motor and it turned out that when they machine the merlin 2 blocks , they put a rediculous chamfer at top of the lifter bore. The lifter oil feed hole was coming up into this chamfer but you couldn't actually see this, I found the problem by pumping the oil with a electric drill with manifold off,oil was gushing out of the lifter bores. When comparing the morels to the comps I had they did have a slightly higher oil band and feed hole. We reduced the base circle of the cam by .050 and it completely solved this problem. As far as the morel lifters, I have never heard of this problem in any other application other than merlin 2 blocks with over .600 lift cams. I am STILL running morel hyd roller lifters in my current blower motor which gets turned as high as 6200 rpm's and runs 190 lbs seat/490 lbs open with ZERO problems, Smitty

great info !!! my machine shop guy just ran into simular issue with a big block mopar and the way the lifters were machined vs block...had no oil pressure...had to change the lifters

Do not run a fram oil filter unless you want a pile on junk parts they are junk and will wipe out your lower end Run a wix napa 1060 or 1061 wix 51794 is alonger filter or any other good brand