Stovebolt valve springs have approximately the strength of a Sealy Posturpedic innerspring mattress, and we're talking about an engine that will be lucky to see 5K RPM at most. It's not going to race Formula 1 at 12K! The pushrods will be 3/8" diameter .060" wall thickness seamless stainless steel tubing, not the 1/4" solid soda straws Chevy ran for about 3 decades. Everything in the modification is 300% stronger than it really needs to be, so I don't have any worries that it will self-destruct as long as I can make it work on paper before I start whittling on metal. The BBC rocker arm is not quite long enough on the "short" side to end up directly above the lifters. Look at the pushrod cant on a MOPAR 426 hemi sometime- - - -I've built a few dozen of them for the 4WD truck pullers in my area. The most recent one I built was 547 cubic inches, the block cooling passages were filled with epoxy, and we only ran coolant in the aluminum cylinder heads.
Not my first rodeo- - - -I'm the middle guy of 5 generations in the automotive business from my grandfather in the 1920's to my grandson who is a line mechanic working six days a week after getting medically discharged from the Marine Corps from serious physical and emotional injuries in the sand box. Dad was winning 1/4 mile dirt track races with an alcohol-fueled flathead V8 in a 34 Ford 3 window coupe in the late 1940's. I taught auto mechanics in Tennessee state trade schools and high schools for 30+ years, and built round trackers for a little over 30 years before I "retired" in 2011.
Jerry
