427 headed back to FRP

[GBowman]

Only has 2300 miles. Solid roller set up, was cruising @ 2200 RPM's running like a dream then a bad sound, backfire and shut down. Pulled valve cover to find #3 rocker down a little too far. Pulled the intake, removed the #3 lifters to find the roller had fallen off of the #3 exhaust lifter. The cam lobe then was hitting the "ears" of the lifter where the roller should have been and took a beating. I'm sure all of that metal went somewhere so I am leaving it to Ford to look at. Lash was good on both sides of all other valves and the motor has only seen the rev limiter work once or twice (set @ 6000 RPM). I don't race or abuse the car at all. The Ford engineer said they have not seen this before, the motor has extremely high quality parts-there was no "skimping" from that standpoint. Maybe a machining or assembly issue who knows. The car was using some oil which seemed to be an issue with a few of these motors, I was in the process of trying (through process of elimination with the help of Ford tech support) to figure out. I don't see the two issues being connected but we will see.