Unlike Reese’s these are not two great tastes that taste great together.
For those who don’t subject themselves to pushrod engines that is coolant sitting on a rocker arm. There should not be coolant on a rocker arm. I started digging in to this thinking that the intake gaskets were leaking but once I pulled the intake manifold I couldn’t see any evidence of that. The damage here was from me starting to scrape it off. I then thought maybe the head gaskets and did a compression test. The high was 160 the low 140 with the rest being 150 or 155 so that seemed ok. That leaves a few options.
1. Just do the intake gaskets as originally planned.
2. Do the head gaskets since I’m most of the way to that point anyway.
3. Use this as a rationalization to buy a set of aftermarket heads since the heads could have a crack in a coolant passage causing the problem.
I’m leaning toward #2 but #3 is a very close second.