ok, so - update on the 427, and latest on the Galaxie...
Well - I thought I'd found the smoking gun, but I didn't.
Then, I did!
So, I pulled the oil filter adapter and had a look at the gasket surface and the adapter - on early 427 FE engines, there is an odd extra hole in the pad, NFI what it's for.
Worryingly, there is only the merest suggestion of a gasket surface between that drain hole and the channel for the oil pump, which - if it failed - could allow oil pressure to drain straight back into the oil pan.
So, there should be the oil pump hole, the oil gallery hole (for the rest of the engine) and 4 bolt holes. You can see the extra, small hole sitting there serving no discernible purpose. The oil filter adapter gasket (which is pretty shitty to be honest) only has the smallest amount of gasket between the oil channel and this hole (at about 11 o'clock), so I put a new gasket on there, and blocked the hole so it couldn't dump oil pressure there again..
But - that wasn't the issue.
So, I checked on the oil pressure relief valve at the back of the engine above the CAM. Very hard to find pics of the valve, or how it goes in, but I found this pic:
Which might be the one the engine builder used during reassembly as when I removed the plug on the back of the block, I found this:
The first thing out should have been the valve, not the spring (and there were 2 springs in there, not one) - this is how it's meant to look when reassembling:
So, with the valve and spring arranged like that, the valve was leaving the oil-bleed hole in the block (here it is on a 427 side oiler, but it's the same thing on a top oiler above the cam):
So, as a final check, I removed the big-end bearing caps for 4 & 8 and they were perfect, so as far as I'm concerned, we're off to the races and the new engine can go in once I have done the next things....
