Rollermaster instructions
 

You would think these guys would get it right. First pic is Rollermasters instructions for their best .005 short timing set with Iwis chain.

Problem, you can not replicate it with the actual chain set. Well the cam gear anyway.
We all know how its done stock, the right edge of the keyway lines up with the center line of the cam gear, marks on both gears and the center line of the crank.
But the drawing on Rollermasters instructions show a gap between the center line and the right edge of the key way. At least as wide as the key way is itself.
It all works if you line it up just like my old Motors manual shows.
Cam comes in at 111.5 on a 112 so its a 1/2 degree advanced, perfect.
But it would be nice if the instructions were correct because you can not replicate it on the car. Tried one tooth each direction, nope.

I even pulled out a new stock style Elgin chain set with Morse chain and lined it all up. Then put the Rollermaster back on. Nothing moved, they matched locations.
But here is the thing. The stock style timing chain is actually tighter than the fancy Rollermaster;s best. Aftermarket I get 3/8" chain deflection.
Elgin/Morse I get 1/4" deflection.
I have Cloyes best .005 short timing set too. Its about the same as the Rollermaster, maybe a tad loser. But I bought the Rollermaster because you can get their short chain set with their top of the line Iwis roller chain. Cloyes only offers their best roller chain with a standard timing set.

And this freaking old Elgin/Morse link type timing chain set I paid 15$ for on E Bay 20 years ago seems to be better than both.

Frustrating.
I think I will end up buying a Milodon gear drive and be done with this stuff on the next engine. I have almost the cost of one in timing chains laying around at this point anyway.

Looks like Cliff is right on this stuff.

There will always be more slop in any roller type timing chain then a link type chain.

It’s the nature of the Beast as they say!

Thanks for posting the details that you have found and the time you have put in.

Couple of things to add.

A stock 3/4" wide Morse chain is considerably stronger than any type of roller timing set. Even better if you get older varieties with the heat treated steel gears, but I would use a currently available cast iron sprocket set WAY before I'd use any double roller chain.

What's missing on any double roller chain set is a tensioner. I've been into GOBS of engines over the years and many used roller chains in them, but they ALWAYS have a spring loaded or hydraulic tensioner of some sort to take up the slack.

I tried the Rollmaster once and it failed in 4 years with pretty hard use. I drove more miles and made more track runs that most reading this and the chain got so loose it starting flopping all over the place the the car started breaking up in high gear at the top end of the track. I just thought I had a bad plus, wire or worst case bent a pushrod or broke a valve spring. Everything appeared OK the next day so I pulled the engine and took it apart only to find the timing chain had about 4" of slop in it. Yes, I could just about walk it right off the gears!

No real reason that happened. I had a .030" hole in the front oil gallery plug to spray extra lube on it. I wasn't running much spring pressure and standard 60psi oil pump so the load on it wasn't all that great. What I think happens is that they start to flop back and forth when they get loose and it amplifies the stretching out/wearing out process. Just a guess and don't really care, I went back to using 3/4 wide Morse chain sets and no more issues.

Even with all that said the way most folks use these vehicles you'll probably never have any issues. Most of these cars are lucky to have 3000 miles put on them in the next 20 years, so you'll never have to worry about your double roller timing set going South on you.

You have to be very careful when installing a Rollmaster 9 keyway set and it's pretty easy to line one up wrong if you deviate from the "zero" keyway on the crankshaft. I love stories so here goes a good one.

A "famous" Pontiac engine "builder" and machinist did an engine for a customer. It was a "high" end build, hefty roller cam and extensively ported heads, etc. It was supposedly "ran in" on a test engine then picked up and installed by the customer. Since it was going to be raced it was a pretty "high end" build and I supplied the carb and distributor for it. The customer gets it installed and it's WAY down on power. Seems to idle OK, and drives OK but when you go to heavy or full throttle it "backfires" up thru the carb. He can't figure it out, so he enlists all his friends, beer drinking buddies, several local "guru's", and even the wife's boyfriend to assist and ALL of them tell him the Q-jet is a POS and holding the engine back.

So I get the carb back, and it's absolutely FLAWLESS everywhere. Send it back and no improvement. So it comes back again after a shop that specializes in building these engines once again tells him the carb is a POS. This time I put it on my car, go to our local track and send it back with a time slip. I thought that would end the "drama", but no, now the owner wants to trailer the car nearly 900 miles for me to look at. LOVELY, but I agreed.

So the car shows up, and he fires it up to back it out of the trailer and it just doesn't sound right to me. Seems to idle OK but just not sounding overly "heathly" like a 600hp 455 should sound. So the customer leaves the car and trailer then heads back home. I couldn't resist working on it so did a test drive and it drives OK, but wouldn t spin the back tires if you dropped it off a floor jack! So I remove the Shaker and air cleaner lid and "blip" the throttle really quick which resulted in burnign off most of my eyebrows when it backfired in my face!

So I removed the drivers side valve cover and rotated the engine until toward #1 TDC on the compression stroke. The #1 intake usually starts coming up slightly before TDC, but this one was WAY, WAY off the mark.

So I pulled the timing cover and noticed the "builder" had used a Rollmaster timing set and advanced the cam. No big deal however they FAILED to count up and back to the left two teeth and establish a new reference point to line up the top sprocket....DUH?

So the cam is WAY out of phase and had been that way since it left the builder. Anyhow, I moved the top sprocket to the correct location, buttoned it back up. The engine fired right up, sounded completely different and making at least 300 more HP than it did with the cam in the wrong place. It was a 4 speed car and any full throttle below about 30 mph in 1st or 2nd and you were all over the road trying to keep it out of the ditch!

The owner picked the car up a few days later and went on to run well into the 11's with it at the track.

Moral of the story and lessons learned. Just because a self proclaimed "guru" and Pontiac engine building expert does your engine don't think for a minute that it was done correctly. Also READ THE DIRECTIONS if you are installing any timing set and DOUBLE CHECK your work after moving it. I'm certain the "builder" checked it "dot to dot", saw it needed advanced a few degrees, moved the bottom sprocket, then lined it up dot to dot and didn't check it again. So don't leave out that step either......FWIW.......

was that engine "built" in virginia by any chance?

A roller chain does not self dampen to the loading and unloading of a cam lobe as 16 valves opens and close, in fact it’s said that the added mass of the rollers themselves when not riding on either gear creates a escalation of vibrations as the rpms go up with the result that the chain beats itself up due to yet a different pitch of vibrations then the cam lobes make.
Also we have not factored in the 17th load of driving a mechanical fuel pump, nor the loading and whatever vibration pitch the oil pump adds to the mix.

The next motor I do for myself will get the duel idler gear drive I have sitting on my self even if it’s only a street motor!

PMD engineering included an R&D task to find the cam-crank CL distance for least torsional harmonics. Closer or further CL increased torsional loads on the....camshaft.

"was that engine "built" in virginia by any chance?"

Doesn't matter much at this point but clearly shows that you can end up with less than desireable results even if you think you've hired someone who knows what they are doing..........and of course the carb guy gets ALL the blame!.......

Post from 2011...
This gear drive is still in my engine and never looked at since it was buttoned up. Still silent. Rollers have been junk for a long time...

Once again, I come back to the good, better, best scenario. There are roller timing sets I wouldn't put on a bicycle because I wouldn't want to injure my ankle when the chain snapped. On the other end of the spectrum we ran a STOCK out of the box Cloyes billet timing chain set with the "Z" chain, in the nitro funny car Boss Bird. No tricks, no extra oiling, no torrington bearing. No crank support, no harmonic balancer. 450 lbs. closed spring pressure, 1050 lbs. open pressure, 35 lbs. of boost through an ancient 1980's vintage roots SSI blower. 8000 RPM's typical, but reached 10,700 RPM's when transmission failed to shift once. All valvetrain components stayed where they belonged. We had a blower explosion once that stopped the engine and sheared off the camshaft key. I re-used the timing set on the next build. I would put Rollmaster timing sets in the slightly better category among the roller sets. Cloyes sets are so easily available, and reasonably priced, I don't know why people are always looking for something better. Cloyes even has a flat link set for Cliff! American company and they make the sprockets in USA. Full disclosure, (Chains are sourced from numerous world suppliers but made to Cloyes specs.) JWIS are the best chains along with Renold of France. Some other brands are using more and more Rolon branded chains. Made in India. Quality is marginal. I will not put a Chinese chain in anything I care about. FWIW

Slightly confusing item: The "Best" Rollmaster IWIS chian they offer is the same as the standard Cloyes IWIS roller chain. The "Z" series IWIS chain is proprietary to Cloyes. Essentially, additional heat treat and micro polishing. Cloyes has 100% verification of each timing set on their race stuff. Every set goes on a fixture and sprockets and chains are select fit for center to center distance and deflection.

CLOYESTTF!!!

One needs to measure how many degrees pass between the movement of the cam when turning the crank. The sprocket design will make the chain appear loose but turn the cam almost instantly. The chain needs to be a bit loose or it will cost excessive power due to the friction of the chain binding on the sprockets.... I hope that makes sense.

The Rollmaster chain marks are a "reference " point. Definetly not exact. Once you've done several you start to get used to them and they work just fine. But they can definitely be confusing at first.

We should remember the old timing chains (which were much simpler) would change the cam timing eight degrees when one was thinking it was moving it four.... So those weren't ideal. The other crazy thing is when they changed from the +4/-4 numbers to the different shaped symbols referring to advance and retard things became confusing. I had a very good experienced ASE certified mechanic working for me and he misinterpreted the "symbols" and had the cam in wrong.... Then I made the same mistake a couple months later. They clarified the instructions since. Sometimes we should leave well enough alone.

The best is when you get a Rollmaster timing set that has the dot-to-dot numbers advanced 8 degrees.... Those make for a great amount of wasted time.

The gear drives will set you back sixty years in technology.

Cloyes IWIS roller chain. The "Z" series IWIS chain is best, no doubt.

The Cloyes .005 short chain I have does say JWIS on it. The Rollermaster .005 Red Series I bought from Butler you can not see any markings on the chain.
What would be nice is if Cloyes offered their best Z chain in ,005 short. And I have one of those too but for the life of me I can not find it but I remember it did not fit too bad even though it was std.
I have one of those Cloyes 3/4" wide link types sets. 30$ so I thought I would take a look at one. Its way looser than my Elgin/Morse chain set.

Agreed! (What my brother uses for racing.)

https://www.cloyes.com/part-finder-s...20428%2C%20455

Why do you say the gear drives will set you back 60 years in tech ?
With most industrial things, gear drives are better than chain drives. 4 WDs gear drive transfer cases were always better than chain drives.
I have yet to find someone who did not like their Milodon gear drives.
Have you had any bad experiences with them ?

I know plenty who disliked their duel idler style Pete Jacksons.

Exactly and if you don’t know how to degree a cam in the first place. The light will never come on.

This is what I was told by the design engineer at Cloyes. The Z chain was designed for the LS1 engine when they were having issues with them failing the other chains in that engine. The Pontiac chain is the same part number. The Pontiac has a different tooth count and a different center to center distance, but uses the same chain. They only needed a STD chain for the LS1 because so few of them are line honed in the field. When the mains get torn out of an LS1, I guess they just scrap most of them. They would certainly never make a special super high strength chain just for a Pontiac. It is just a happy coincidence that it fits. FWIW, we ran the regular IWIS Cloyes chain in the Grocery Getter for 17 years and in the funny car for 3-4 years before the "Z" chain became available. Never had a timing chain failure or excessive slack develop. But I admit drag racing is not the same as 10's of thousands of street miles. We had so many other things to worry about on those engines with the power we were making and the other parts we were failing, if a part was simple, reasonably priced and worked, it stayed on the engine unless there was a reason to change it. We put incredible stress on that chain drive in the funny car. In addition to my previous post, we drove a 44 AMP MSD magneto directly off the cam sprocket, also an Enderle dual drive off of the cam. That in turn drove a 43 GPM oil pump
@ 200 + PSI and the fuel pump for the nitro. All that stuff off that double roller timing chain. Zero failures in 11 years.

The Cloyes wide link plate sets are nice until you need to move it and can't find the right degree cam key. Luckily the one in my Firebird degreed spot on at the recommended 107.

Cloyes Z chain. and gear set

https://www.jegs.com/i/Cloyes/220/9-...YaAqJ-EALw_wcB

Harmonics..... Folks stopped using the gear drive when the belt drive was developed. Gear drives were considered the "hot setup" in the 60's.

So in other words, they went out with high buckle shoes..LOL God those things where noisy.