So as long as I stay under 4500rpm i have no issues. however, if i wind it up to 5500+ after I let off i get loud lifter ticking. I mean really bad. I think my lunati lifters are loosing their pump.
It was this way with my stock heads and also the tfs heads I have in there now. I dis fit the push rods so i know they are correct.
i am running a high flow oil pump and a stock pan. There is no windage tray in the pan. After about a minute they pump back up and are fine. They were doing this with the last set of lifters i had as well. I thought i may have had a bad lifter so i replaced them. no diff. I am running 10-30 oil. I am going to change the oil and use 50w. Its okay cuz i live in az and im not worried about the thicker oil.
I am also burning a crap load of oil as well. But with good compression.

any Ideas fellas?

 

What is your oil pressure?

 

That's a good place to start, what is your oil pressure doing during all this?

10W30 is awfully light for an early V8, I always ran 20W50 Castrol GTX with great results.

How many miles are on your rotating assembly? Heads?

What heads are you running? If they are old, were they converted with hardened valves, guides, seats? I ask because when running high RPMs, you should have an abundance of oil in your valve covers. The ticking you are hearing could possibly be pre-detonation caused by the relative low "octane" rating of the oil being sucked passed the valve seals/guides. This would also cause heavy oil usage while retaining compression.

There are still a lot of questions & testing to be done, but bad valves/guides/seals & seats could explain most everything.

You have good compression and you would obviously notice if you were leaving large oil spots everywhere you parked, so the valve train is the only area left to lose a significant amount of oil while still running reasonably well.

 

Sounds like the OP's high flow pump may be sucking the pan dry. Maybe a standard pump is sufficient.
But yeah, one should know their oil pressure before asking such questions.

 

Did you clean the oil pan well when you installed the pump? I have seen this before when gunk clogged up the oil pick up screen. Or when there was a severe dent in the oil pan that was reducing the gap to the oil pickup screen. The pan was blocking some of the flow.

Running oil that is too thin for the engines tolerances could do this.

I have seen this when a guy was running 2 quarts low on oil, but never when the oil pan was full.

Does your year engine have any internal oil galley plugs? If so, maybe one was left out or vibrated loose after the engine was assembled? This would explain what you are experiencing. Part of the oil volume is just spraying internally on the engine.

The tappet issue tells you that under those conditions you are losing oil pressure and volume. This has to be completely and properly diagnosed & corrected before your engine blows, under those conditions your entire rotating assembly is being damaged to some degree.

 

well it is a fairly new rebuild. There is only about 6k miles since it was rebuilt 3 years ago. It is the original 289 block that came with the car. It was rebuilt by a shop with a great rep. However, that doesnt mean crap these days.
I dont know the oil pressure. I only have the stock guage with the L and H on it. when the rpms get over 2k it is H. almost all the over to the left. I never drops below 3/4 on the guage. Im going to go ahead and put a better guage on it.

The heads are tickflow and i recently put them on. I did have them tested and everything seals up well and they also have new seals in them. It did the came things with my previous stock heads.

 

You need larger oil capacity (pan) if you're running a high volume pump. You're pumping it out of the pan faster than it can return. Either that or install a regular pump.