The procedure to seal the spring seat is this:

remove valvespring and stem seal/spring seat
clean guide and seat area with brake cleaner or lacquer thinner
apply wicking Loctite (Loctite 290) to the base of the valve guide where it goes into the cylinder head. A tiny tiny bit is all it takes to seal the guide
apply a thin coating of RTV to the bottom of the stem seal/spring seat
fill the small holes in the sides of the stem seal/spring seat with RTV
install stem seal/spring seat
reassemble

This is what the valve guide looks like:

Your basic valve guides, except that there are four per bloody cylinder...

This is what the spring seat/stem seals look like outside the car:

They are supposed to be a single unit, like the two on the right. The one on the left is broken. Most of them came apart like that as we were removing them. In this picture you can see the holes that I had to fill with RTV. They are ~3/32"

This is the spring seat with RTV:

This is the best image I could take with my camera. The others are closer but out of focus. The bottom of the spring seat also has a thin coating of RTV on it. This blue RTV is supposed to be able to cure even in the presence of a small amount of oil.

The wicking Loctite is no big deal. It's just a thin green liquid with very little surface tension. You deposit a few drops uphill from the valve guide, the drops run around the guide on both sides and fully encircle it, then continue downhill to the bottom edge of the spring seat area. Allen Cline assured me that this is enough.

Spring seat/stem seal, spring and retainer stack:

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Punch the gas and feel the back step sideways; rip off a powershift and hear the tires punished by torque; downshift, lift off and feel the engine braking that comes only from big cubes, listen to the pop and gurgle. Know that you are driving an American V8. There are finer engines made, but none that are this cool.

This is the bottom of the lifter:

You can see the hole which allows oil inside the lifter. The factory valve lift is greater than the width of the galeries which supply oil to the lifters, so they don't need continuous oil pressure in order to function. Allen Cline said that when they were introduced, they were state of the art.

Oops... I haven't taken a picture of the tool yet... I'll get to that tomorrow.

I almost made a bad mistake... I timed the right bank, then bottoned it up. I replaced the seals and springs on the left bank, then timed it and buttoned it up. I opened the right bank back up to double check something and noticed that the timing marks were way off...
Because the N* has an intermediate timing drive with strange ratios, there are funky things that go on with timing. The crank to intermediate shaft ratio is 7:5 (7 turns of crank to 5 turns of intermediate sprocket). So when you turn the engine a bit (as we did to bring each cylinder in turn to TDC), you'll have to continue to turn it until you've turned it a total of seven times in order to get the timing marks on crank and I-sprocket to line back up. I did this in between timing the right bank and timing the left bank. Anyone know what this means? Turning the crank 7 times turns the cams 3.5 times... so the right bank and left bank would have been 180 degrees out from each other. Good thing I caught that...

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Punch the gas and feel the back step sideways; rip off a powershift and hear the tires punished by torque; downshift, lift off and feel the engine braking that comes only from big cubes, listen to the pop and gurgle. Know that you are driving an American V8. There are finer engines made, but none that are this cool.

Luck, Fate and Destiny are words used by those who lack the courage to define their own future

That's the valvetrain tool. It's a two man operation with a good bit of strength required to compress the valve springs, and a little bit of dexterity to keep the keepers in place while doing it.

Started the engine today after spending most of the day organizing the harness... it still smokes. I'm tired right now, and I'm going to eat and go to bed shortly.

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Punch the gas and feel the back step sideways; rip off a powershift and hear the tires punished by torque; downshift, lift off and feel the engine braking that comes only from big cubes, listen to the pop and gurgle. Know that you are driving an American V8. There are finer engines made, but none that are this cool.

Man, sorry to hear that That always seems to happen to me, I work constantly on a project, and it doesn't work. Then I work straight for 1,000 hours, and the moment of truth.... still doesn't work. I'm sure you'll get it figured out after a nice break from it In the meantime..... Do you have the measurements for those springs and retainers? I would LOVE to get my hands on a stock application for those (i.e. CHEAP). I bet they're really easy to find (like 350 SBC ones or something). But need dia/height/wire thickness possibly. Every little bit helps. Gotta get me some of those and redrill the cam sprockets... mmmm

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Punch the gas and feel the back step sideways; rip off a powershift and hear the tires punished by torque; downshift, lift off and feel the engine braking that comes only from big cubes, listen to the pop and gurgle. Know that you are driving an American V8. There are finer engines made, but none that are this cool.

quote Originally posted by Will: You couldn't have asked me that before I put them in, could you? They're not that expensive from Alan. $150 for 32 springs is not too expensive.

No... no I waited until you put them in on purpose

bummed to see your having problems after all the work you put into that engine.

i was just curious if you have done a compression check since you first tryed it?

i am racking my brain trying to think of how the oil is getting into the cylinders.

was there any oil film in the intake itself?

is the oil pressure you have now more than when the engine was rebuilt? is there any way the oil from the lifters is still under pressure over the valve seals? can the up and down motion of the valve/lifters act to compress oil through the seals?

I haven't run a compression check yet. I may do that today. I just took the car for a drive. It had used more than 1 qt of oil in 41 miles before I took it out. It's got a little over 60 on it now, but I didn't check the oil when I got back. I took the intake back off and there was still oil on the backs of the closed intake valves, just not as much as there was before I did the stem seals. It hardly smokes at all until the oil gets good and warm, then it barely stops (only when I'm into the throttle fairly hard climbing a hill in a high gear). It initially doesn't smoke on coast down, but as it heats up it starts to. It always blows a puff as I transition from off throttle through light throttle to heavier throttle.

Sitting in the driveway idling warm, most of the smoke it blows comes out of the rear bank pipe. The front bank pipe hardly blows any, yet the front bank exhaust is hotter. Manually blip the throttle and it will blow smoke out of both pipes, though.

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Punch the gas and feel the back step sideways; rip off a powershift and hear the tires punished by torque; downshift, lift off and feel the engine braking that comes only from big cubes, listen to the pop and gurgle. Know that you are driving an American V8. There are finer engines made, but none that are this cool.