Dartgame

Excellent Ideas about this situation. Will keep this in mind.
 
Anyway, I fiddled around with the lash adjustment and came to a conclusion that the few lifter adjustment pads I thought were cupped - are indeed NOT cupped. Keep in mind this car has 40K on it and never had the valves adjusted from what I can tell. What I believe is that over the years with the valves sinking into the block a little, it caused next to no lash on a few isolated valves. 
 
Adjusting the valves - So what I did was use the speedy valve adjustment chart where you use TDC for 1 and 6 and adjust the valves as indicated in the chart. Interestingly what I found was several valves ended up being looser adjusted this way from 2-4 thousands larger using 10 and 12 thou for intake and exhaust respectively. So what I did - for instance was bring #3 intake up to full lift (approximately by eye) and then checked and adjusted #3 exhaust. I went around all 12 valves this way and located several that needed this fine tuning. All done cold. Started her up and voila running like a sewing machine. I suspect the speedy chart doesnt account for the cams ramp in a few cases and thus gives the wrong lash reading. I ran the motor and fiddled with one of the exhausts that was not spinning. I tightened it a little so it was reading about 9 thou hot, and it started spinning some anyway. The rest looked fine.
 
I was hesitant about messing with this stuff hot, but it was not as bad as I had imagined. What I am going to do is get some long feeler gauges ranging from .009 to .014 so as to avoid touching the hot exhaust manifold when running, adjust as needed, and close the book on this learning chapter.