cfinch

I'm having some oil pressure issues with a car I'm putting together...

Initially I had swapped in a "known good" ka into my s14... I almost didn't buy it because the head gasket looked to have just been done and the person I was purchasing it from seemed pretty reputable. Well that wasn't the case as it had no compression in 1 cylinder... So I pull the cylinder head and have a couple valves replaced along with some guides and it's ready to go back in. I assemble everything and perfect compression across the board so success!

Well I finally get the car fired up and it sounds terrible as if there is no oil pressure. I can see a small amount of oil settling in the head but the cam lobe I could access through the oil cap was dry after running a couple times. So I give it a rest and come back to it today and removed the valve cover. While cranking I can now see oil finally getting on the cam lobes and seems to be getting oil up there. Fire it back up and still sounds horrible. Look under the oil cap and yeah I can see alittle oil on the cam lobe but the inside of the head is fairly dry.

So I go to the next step and pull the oil pressure sensor and put a gauge on it... 95 psi at 3k rpm and I tried a couple different ones my Matco one and a cheapo one. Right away that seems way too high. It is fresh oil and it's 10w-30 but still just seems too high. I'm assuming that maybe there is a blockage somewhere? I'm kind of stuck right now as to what to do... I'm considering maybe running some atf through the motor or worst case maybe kerosene for a few seconds... Possibly pulling the cams and trying to blow through the oil passages with an air chuck... The only other thing I can think of beyond that is to pull the head to blow through the oil passages.

Anyone got any ideas?