[Steve C.]

Years ago I a buddy here in town that ran a stroked 351 Windsor in his mustang with Crower solid roller lifters, when I asked him about it he had over 20,000 miles on the combo. At that time it was his daily driver for work. Also another friend had a Nova with a built 383cid small-block that was a daily driver for quite a while, it too had similar mileage on it.

On the subject, years ago Lee Atkinson had a Bullet (UltraDyne) SR in his SBF using Comp EndureX lifters. Cam had a bit over .400" lobe lift, and 1.7 rockers. At that time the motor had been together for years, and around 9,000 miles on it, and still worked great. The valvesprings were top notch, Manley Nextek - he had forgotten the pressure, but knew it was more than needed. The extra pressure makes SURE the lifters stay on the lobe.

A fun longevity story now that Lee is lurking here ...

The first solid roller cam I used was a small Crower probably 20 years ago. No issues. Later I passed on that used roller cam to Lee Atkinson, who passed it on to his friend warren who used it as a street cam. Warren put over 10,000 street miles on his roller cammed 455. He took things apart to check, and found his bronze distributor gear still looked fine. He ended up replacing his roller lifters, but only because his wife's cat peed on them and made them rust

Warren sold the car to a guy he knew in a local club, who then sold it to a moron that did some really stupid things to it. Then a fellow Lee had been friends with since he was 17 came across the car, and Lee helped him buy it. Warren actually came over and helped this guy get the car running "right" again. At the time it was STILL running nicely, more than 15 years later.


.

[goat2789]

Update. Got a new cam from comp and starting to put things together. Comp said they did not like the core choice from the original cam and picked one with a larger base circle. I also measured my lifter bore clearance with feeler gauge and they definitely have some wear. Question is should I run my old lifters or buy new? Also are the lifter bores still ok to run?

[25stevem]

You need to check for taper also which you can not accomplish with a feeler gauge.

Please go into your phones photo section and hit edit so you can hit the spin option on that photo and reload it.
Thanks in advance!

[HWYSTR455]

It's all garbage now, it all needs to be replaced.

You sure the pushrods were the right length? I'm kind of doubting it.

Should check retainer contact and spring bind too.

If it's iron heads, should check pushrod guide hole clearance too.


.

[HWYSTR455]

Only one proper way to check pushrod geometry (length).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5is9BsH5OU

.

[adynes]

To me that looks like surface fatigue (spalling). Possibly caused by insufficient valve spring force and/or instability/flexing somewhere in the valvetrain, causing the lifters to loft and impact onto the lobe.

[adynes]

https://www.ls2.com/forums/showthrea...732-Cam-Damage

A portion of a reply from Crane tech to the forum post above:

"That being said, your problem appears to be a classic example of asymmetrical lofting of the lifter/valve assy. When this happens the lifter flies off the intake ramp well before the nose and then slams back on the nose (often at a point just where the nose is rolling to the closing flank) causing the roller wheel to skid before it starts to roll again. This just starts eating the metal away and it gets progressively worse.

The main cause of this is a harmonic reinforcement, at some operating speed or condition, that is causing the natural harmonic in the spring to be aggravated by a complimentary harmonic in the pushrod and possibly the lift table of the lobe. This probably wasn't an issue for quite a long time, but these harmonics wear on any spring (ovate or conventional) and cause a deterioration of pressure. This deterioration then allows the lofting to become more pronounced and much more damaging. Another aggravating factor could be the pushrod stiffness. Inadequate stiffness magnifies the natural frequency issues in the pushrod. My recommendation to reduce the potential for this would be to use heavy wall pushrods (.080" thick) and a good dual coil spring. The lift of this cam had to be pushing the springs (that were available to Callaway at the time) to the limit."

[adynes]

Only issue I have with the Crane reply above is that I would recommend a larger diameter pushrod instead of thicker wall (or in combination with thicker wall). Increasing diameter offers vastly more improvement in stiffness compared to wall thickness. Increasing wall thickness past a certain point only improves stiffness by a small percent.

5/16" pushrod is too small in my opinion for anything performance, especially at the relatively long length a Pontiac requires. RAIV used 11/32 I believe. I have 3/8 in my build.

[Formulajones]

And that whole theory gets into a different area that we have discussed on this forum numerous times. "Spring Pressure"

Not enough is just as bad, and even worse, than too much.

[goat2789]

Thanks for all the input. My top end package was from SD Performance so I’m sure there are hundreds of these out there with no issues. I will also check around to see who has a valve spring scale.

[Formulajones]

I would be curious, as I know a couple others would be, what the spring seat pressure is now, since it's been together 10 years.

I'm sure it was fine when new, no one is questioning that. Over time they unfortunately degrade to some degree.

[6T5 Cat]

I had a similar failure back in 2008 of the same two lobes on my comp hydraulic roller. I replaced the cam and rollers. I soon started to hear noise again. I removed the intake and valley cover and checked the cam and rollers, luckily that were ok. I decided to check further and removed the timing cover. No problems there either. I then removed the oil galley plugs and found the problem. The oil galley was completely blocked in the rear of the galley causing oil starvation to those two lifters and lobes. I cleared the blockage and the engine has been running without issues since then. Might be to your advantage to check your oil galleys while the engine is apart.

[goat2789]

Looking at doing the crower hippo solid roller lifters, butler recommends the 66294H but of course they are on back order

[Formulajones]

Well, solid rollers are going to require a different spring pressure, and putting them on a hydraulic roller cam creates a whole different scenario that some cam gurus don't like and won't recommend. While it's been done, it's not been on a large scale, and the spring suggestions have been all over the map as far as success stories are concerned.

The root cause of your issue was never discovered or not disclosed so I wouldn't count out or blame the hydraulic rollers at this point.

Many of us have had solid roller failures too, they are not immune to it. A roller is a roller and the biggest reason for people trying this hybrid swap is to avoid the hydraulic noise issues that some see with inconsistent bleed down rates. But that wasn't your problem.

[goat2789]

Thanks for the input. I’m not sure what to do. I’ve been chasing noisy lifters for years on my motor. That’s why I finally pulled it apart. I also thought about running my old lifters cranked down fully compressed and backing off a little. I read of others doing this. My lifters are still pumped up so I would have to figure out how to drain them down. Remove clip?

[gtobob67]

I run mine close to bottomed out. First set of Comps were noisy. Second set were the newer Shavers from Comp. Still too noisy. Saw a post by Cliff saying to run them close to being bottomed out. Cylinder top dead center, run the nuts down 1/4 turn, wait a bit and run in down 1/4 turn, etc. Mine ended up 2 1/4 turns to bottom. Takes some time. Have some music and beer. I used a .020 feeler gauge between the roller and valve stem. Bottom out the lifter, remove the feeler gauge and cinch the polylock. Ended up about .016 from the bottom. You'll need longer pushrods. I ended up with 9.050. I have close to 5000 miles on it now and it is extremely quiet. May not be ideal, but I've had no issues at all.

[Cliff R]

I've been recommending adjusting up from bottomed out vs down from zero lash for quite some time. Even better use a feeler gauge between the valve and rocker and adjust to zero, then pull out the feeler gauge.and they are all exactly the same.

We end up doing this simply because of the poor quality of the lifters in terms of plunger to body tolerances (leak down rates).

In theory it shouldn't matter where you set them down from zero lash as long as the plungers are compressed some, but in reality leaving a lot of plunger travel results in have a few "tickers" in the bunch. In extreme cases we get excessive valve train noise especially when things heat up and the oil thins out.....

[goat2789]

Thanks. I will give that a try.

[KEN CROCIE]

Looks like skidding to me.

[TedRamAirII]

Now I'm afraid of Flat Tappets AND Rollers! LOL