Old time racers often reminisce about the quality of the original Empi forged steel 1.4 to 1 rockers. As some of the old timers know, the Empi rockers were designed after the proto set I made in the early 60's when Dean Lowry and I made our first ever high ratio rocker arms for the VW engines. Mine were made from a 356 Porsche and Dean's were made from the stock VW. Needless to say, the Porsche design was adopted as it had the adjusting screw on the pushrod end, which provides far more RPM with less valve spring (also the reason why a roller tipped rocker should never be used on a VW). In the mid 70's Empi went out of business and it was almost impossible to find these high ratio rocker sets anymore so other companies started to make inexpensive cast iron copies. The quality of these were horrible and they suffered from seizing and breakage. Some people tried to fix the seizing by installing needle bearings. This stopped the seizing but made the shaft far too small and the rocker bore way too large to have any strength. In fact, these rockers are far weaker when compared to the factory stock VW forged rocker arms. It was obvious that in order to have a quality rocker arm a forging must again be made. Some people had made forged ones, however, they must have contracted to have them made as cheap as possible, rather than to a quality standard as they continually broke. This was an opportunity for me to not only make a super quality product, but to make design updates that no one else has ever addressed. I started with my original prototype of the Empi rocker arm and completely repositioned its location by making both ends longer so the adjusting screw alignment was maintained over the pushrod hole for maximum pushrod to pushrod tube clearance. Assembled in USA from domestic and foreign parts. |