SBC valve guide/seal leakage?
 

Just pulled my heads off to have a complete valve job done. I noticed that most of the exhaust valves in the port area were covered in some way with rings or streaks/smears of oil. My question is this. Should there be ANY oil on ANY part of the exhaust valves? I have attached some pics.

Thanks
Randy

This pic shows what several of the valves/ports look like. The small black ring around the bottom of the valve(top of port) appears to be oil....

This pic if you look closely shows also what several of the valves have. Which is a portion of the valve with a coating of oil. It is darker in color than the rest of the valve and slightly wet with and oily substance.

Here is one where one valve looks ok but the one next to it has the whole valve covered.

Last one...

Look ok to me >I have seen them leave trails out the port before.You do want some oil so the guild want seez

Well thats good to know. But why would different valves have different amouts of oil on them. Also the valves with the most oil on them had coresponding amounts of oil on the threads of the plugs. The valves with less oil on them had less oil on the plug threads. These heads only have about 70 Hours on them.One other note the intake valves all looked pretty clean. It was the exhaust valves that had the oil on them. Does this make a change in your thoughts Strip? Anybody else want to chime in?

Thanks again
Randy
"Bad-Habit"

The exhaust gets all the heat so it prob has the most wear to the guild and seal. not shure about the spark plug I have had one motor that did it but never had any prob with any oil in it. maybe the threads are a little worn on it??

I am curios about the oil on the thread also.



In this pick I burned the oil off this one:eek: :eek: :D

Don't be so surprised with problems with sbc guides.
The real solution is to install positive seals involving machining the guides and also installing bronze guides. With all the motors I've been involved in , this is the only real solution as pertains to head issues.BBB

Some people are thrilled to death to have a little oil going down the exhaust valve guide to lubricate things... It's the intake that usually gets too much oil coming down the guide due to vacuum from the manifold... then you see coking on the underside of the valve. How does the underside of the exhaust valve look?... The picture only showed the stem.