Soft valves?

[t.mcginley.jr]

Hey guys,

So my 90' NA has a production date of 5/89 and has 98k miles on it right now. I just stumbled onto the early Z32 soft valve topic and had a quick question. At 98k miles, symptoms of this issue would have already appeared correct? I currently have a rough idle but I'm almost positive its from shot injectors. I was under the impression that with that many miles, a soft valve would have gone completely bad by now and it would barely run.

Also, didn't early model Z32's have issues with lifter tick from shotty springs?

[t.mcginley.jr]

bump?

[Z31toZ32]

i am not an expert on this topic, but i had a similar concern when i got mine. i was told that it would have surfaced already, and that was at 55k miles, so take that for what it is worth. your rough idle could be a bunch of things, but the injector check is a good start. you can lookup how to olm the injectors on here somewhere. it is pretty easy and will tell you if one or more is out of spec or not working at all. although they will all continue to fail one after the other, depending on which one it is, you could just pop it out and replace it. long term you will probably want to replace them all because they will all eventually fail.

all the z's have a bit of lifter tick when they get older. you could try a thicker oil to quiet them down. what are you running? if it really driving you nuts, you could replace the lifters or rebuild them, but they are both decently involved processes and pretty expensive. i would just try the oil and deal with it unless you are fully restoring the car or something.

[t.mcginley.jr]

Ok thanks for the info, I've read of similar instances where people said if it hasn't already appeared then you should be fine after like 50k or so. Supposedly most of the ones with the soft valves started having problems between 35k and 45k.

At the moment I'm running 10W40 full synthetic. I thought I read somewhere that you could just buy the springs that go inside the lifters but I wasn't sure if that's what causes the lifter tick. The lifters themselves are pretty expensive when I looked... not really trying to do that at only 98k miles