Spitfire 74 1300 - I am officially befuddled...

[jim-w]

Hey folks! I've got a 1300 in my 77 spitfire, and I'm getting oil in all 4 cylinders. a little backstory: End of last fall, generally running pretty well. the car sat for a week or so, and when I fired it up, i had a cloud of white fog - head gasket, no biggie. pulled the head, and as expected, coolant leak into cylinders 3 & 4. No mixing of fluids, all bores looked good, but heads needed some cleanup. I decarbed the head and didn't see any obvious issues, then gave the valves a quick lap. everything looked pretty good for an old engine. put it back together with a good head gasket, fired her up and ran good at idle, but gray oily smoke on acceleration. pulled the head and didn't see any issues with the gasket or mating surfaces, so decided it may have just been burning out leftover oil and such from cleaning things up. new gasket, back together, no change... compression check shows 125-135psi. opened her up again, being extra careful of the fluids, and there was about a teaspoon or so of nice clean oil on top of each piston. I verified clear oil passage to the rocker tube and did some extra cleaning on the valve train. just in case, I installed Ford Pinto stem seals on the intake valves and found a considerable amount of oil on top of the intake valves - a nice little puddle inside the chamber. reassembled, fired right up, still no change. considerable gray smoke, increasing with any acceleration beyond idle. So I ordered a digital borescope and bleed-down test setup. after 15-20 minutes of runtime, the borescope showed a puddle of oil in each cylinder. bleed-down test surprised me by showing 10-12% (though the oil in the cylinders made it a "wet" test, no way to do a "dry" run). all runtime after this last gasket was done with valve cover removed. reasonable dribble of oil through the rockers, but nothing around the valves to explain the oil intrusion (no externa oiler involved)... What am I missing? I can make no sense of it.