mt_goat

If you use a ZDDP additive be very careful, too much can be just as bad (maybe worse) as not enough. See here: http://www.bobistheoilguy.com/forums...1600403&page=1

That's why I say leave the oil blending to the pros. If you use a good HDEO it will have a good amount of ZDDP in it. If you really want to DIY at least do a virgin oil analysis on your homemade blend before using it.

Trainwreckinseattle

Interesting, It is my humble belief that as with many other things people tinker with a lot after hearing a whole bunch of hearsay and speculation. I think as you said it's probably better to let professionals "blend" oil and oil additives. Guessing can cause problems. There are a few non-detergent ZDDP oils if one were to choose to use them. I'm however not on the bandwaggon about having to use it.

I have heard and read all about the ZDDP sagga. Does it have valid points? I'm sure it does. Do manufacturers use it as a point of blame for cheep garbage knock off parts? I'm thinking so.

I know one very large 22R/22RE Engine remanufacturer that uses good condition rocker assemblies, reground oem cams, and doesn't specify any oil, oil additive , or perticular engine break in process. They gurantee their motors and from what I have seen they last and last and last. I have installed their engines into at least 6 customer rigs that are still going strong.


This is my humble opinion agian:

IF quality parts are used, and all processes are proper. An engine rebuild will be Quiet, Seat the Rings, not have a Head Gasket problem, Not have Cam issues, and be a great engine for years to come.

If one thing is skipped, overlooked, or cheeped out on. Well bad things "Can" happen.

Trainwreckinseattle

IF you choose to use that cam. Yes make sure to use a quality cam lube.

I don't know what rings you are using but as long as the hone is correct for the rings they more or less should be seated instantly.

Trainwreckinseattle

I tore down another core back from a customer and yup here's another one. So It was a nice day and I had a couple extra minutes. Here is some serious glory. I also dug around in the shop and found some other stuff to take pictures of.

The cam in the head is a Factory cam. A small lip can be seen. The rocker doesn't cover all of the cam on a 22R/22RE engine, so it's very easy to guage wear do to that little lip.

The first cam is a Aftermarket with serious damage on two lobes and much less damage on a few others.

The second cam is Factory, cam with moderate wear. Two lobes had damage.

Note the 2 notches and also how the little bar is smaller and more round on a factory cam. The aftermarket one also is stamped. EP-32 I have seen that number on a lot of them. Not all aftermarket cams will have that exact mark.

Also there are a few styles of Factory cams. Some are kinda hard to tell that they are factory. 2 notches on a little cast ridge towards the rear of the cam is a good indicator or newer 85+ cams. Early 81+ cams are slightly different looking.

Rocker arms: Note the nice polished shiny faces. Those are GOOD, look at how pitted the tips are, BAD !!







Next ones are Factory







Now Rocker arms and Tips

kenbo53

imo if you want a real good chance of an aftermarket cam holding up u need new rockers. I dont know alot about over head cam motors but with a pushrod motor you must put all the lifters back where they came from or replace them if installing new cam because they develop wear patterns i dont see how this would be a whole lot different. I dont think theres any practical way of checking this and you deffinatly cannot tell just from looking at them. also i dont know y you wouldnt coat all the lobes heavily with assembly lube before firing it up and running a half hour break in before puting a load on it. I really doubt the cams are causing the problems.

Trainwreckinseattle

So why do factory Cams hold up to being mixed and unmatched in hundreds of engines with used good condtion rocker arm assemblies?

A person would think if there was a problem, it would happen all the time not almost exclusivly with aftermarket cams. Am I missing something?


I now have a used messed up aftermarket cam. It will be headed out for some testing very soon.

xxxtreme22r

been thinking about it, but could it be due to Japanese steel versus say US steel?

xxxtreme22r

holy cow, I got a chance to look at those photos, after tearing apart my motor at 170,000 miles my factory cam and adjusters looked nothing like either of those. no groove wore into the cam at all and the tips only showed an hourglass shape as far as wear went.

How many miles were on those cams and adjusters?

Trainwreckinseattle

Chuckle, you're dreamin if you think ANYTHING let alone a 40 dollar aftermarket cam is made in America.

They come from China




Pretty much all of them had around 10,000 miles on them.


Thank God they weren't my motors. These are just cores coming back to me. With the bad economy instead of buying a new car a lot of people fixed their motor, or purchased crappy rebuilt motors about a year ago. It's all starting to come home to roost. I feel sorry for a lot of these people they simply had no idea. That's part of the reason I'm here and other places trying to educate people. I feel horrible for them.

xxxtreme22r

but your saying the aftermarket ones are the ones that are failiang over the oem ones. so let me rephrase that.

could it be due to Japanese steel versus say Chinese steel?

xxxtreme22r

one thing I thing we have overlooked as well is the profile itself, wouldn't a steeper profile cause more force on the cam itself as well. I am not talking lift I am talking how rounded the curve would be from base to crown of each lobe. Not sure what the correct term is for it though.

yotafreakshow

i have a couple of factory cams laying around, other than visual inspection of the lobes and measuring the journals and lobes I don't know if I would recognize issues with the profiles. I may just use the factory one that was in the engine. other than the compression loss from the cracked head, it was running well

kenbo53

if you mean factory as in stock then y would you be mixing and matching the two, if the cam is visibly worn out then the rockers cant be very good either or vice versa. i just saw your post on the price of these things and @ 40 bucks you may very well be right on them being garbage, they might make a nice club but id never actually put one in a motor.

Trainwreckinseattle

I would guess, if they cant care enough to make sure baby formula is up to snuff, I doubt their metal is always consistantly high quality.

There are two things that make a cam what it is.
1: base metal
2: How it's hardened.

There are multiple ways to harden steel. Some are better than others, some cost more than others. From what I "hear" the better way to harden steel also costs more. So ask yourself is the 50 dollar cam or the 400 dollar factory cam going to have the more expensive process?

Im not making judgement, just asking some questions that seem to make sence to me.

Trainwreckinseattle

I will only use Factory rockers in GOOD condition and Factory cams in GOOD condition. After that I only attempt to keep them as a matched pair. But don't make it a rule. And I personally haven't had any problems. As a Side note: IF there is the slightest wear on the cam I send it in to have it ground to factory speck. So 99 percent of my motors have ground cams in them. Still, again I havent had ANY problems with engines that have had good used non ground cams in them.

And yes I do question the quality of the rockers, in another post someone said that Engnbldr said aftermarket adjuster tips are no good. I wonder what they think of the aftermarket rockers?

Flash319

By the look of those adjusters someone doesn't know what .010 is.
THEY TICK, JUST DRIVE IT.....................

Trainwreckinseattle

Actually when a cam goes flat, there is a massive gap between the rocker pad and the lobe. That small surface area then takes some serious shock load as what's left of the cam lobe bangs the valve open.

engnbldr

>>>*I just got in to Portland, I can open this site up here. My dialup at the ranch is impossible.

Quite a discussion, but here is my view. So far we have not found an aftermarket rocker arm we will supply, and we have tried nearly all of them. Even the Topline brand let us down badly, the only Topline part we won't supply with confidence..

Different metalurgy in both the arms and the follower pad than Toyota specs, we tried and had problems, like the entire pad coming loose when the aluminum rocker arm expanded the first time the engine got a bit too hot.

Now we reface them and put them back in service, reports of concerns are close to none at all. Often we find them in good shape and bolt them right back on without a single worry.

On the adjuster screws, Durabond was supplying us, those were far too hard and were breaking. We dumped that brand also and tried another, same problem. Now we buy Toyota only when we need some. We actually tried to buy from their supplier but they wouldn't sell to us. One of Toyota's 400% markup items I think.

Now on Camshafts. It isn't the heat treatment, CMC used to do that, and some Federal blanks we recieved. There is a pic up above of an EP32 camshaft, that CMC logo is a mirror image of the factory's logo. USA made stuff.

Normally a very good part, too. It is the quality of the iron alloy itself, if too hard it begins to break up, that cuts them quickly. Rarely is it from being too soft but it can happen. (Think here how soft bearing material is, that will explain it) Normally there is almost no metal to metal contact at all between the rocker pad and the cam lobe, but get some material in there and it's just like sandpaper. Loading and unloading can break off microscopic chips that chop a lobe up very fast.

Cast iron is the same rockwell at the core as it is on the outside. Properly prepped, they have a Parkerized process covering them, that actually becomes part of the underlying metal. That is what makes them black.

Camshafts with the shiny looking lobes are not Parkerized, we see a much higher ratio of lobe failures with those. There are a few suppliers of new blanks that we won't buy, also.

Then oil companies dropping Zinc didn't help. Not as tough on the slide follower type of cams as lifter designs that must rotate, but still more critical to avoid early damage. Good grease works fine on the 22RE cams, though. I used it for yers, I actually don't remember ever losing one I did myself. I wish I could say the same for Chevies and the small base circle Mopar engines, though. They gave us fits until we figured out that we needed to use breakin springs. Now that worked.

Toyota doesn't need them, they only have 60# seat tension....*EB

Trainwreckinseattle

Thanks for popin in here. I just was at Delta Cams in Tacoma this morning. He had a PILE of EP-32 cams with flat cam lobes. He also said it wasn't from being too soft. He said they tested out fine, but thought it might have something to do with the metal of the lobe being not compatible with the face of the rocker. That's just what he said. That and he WONT sell them, but Gives a LIFETIME warrantee with his regrounds. He said the Factory cam is cold hardened steel and is hardened more or less to the core.

He also noted that he will not use or sell aftermarket rockers.

ALTROM sells Rockers, adjusting screws, and shafts. The Rockers say made in China, but the adjusting screws, and shafts say MADE IN JAPAN. I would assume they are OEM and they are only 1.07 Each instead of 3.50 from Toyota.

engnbldr

>>>*I know the folks at Delta, have for years. They regrind cores, and do a lot of them. They even did a few hundred for us way back about 10 years or so ago.

We made the decision to go with all new, bit more expensive but it works better for us. So of course we are competitors now.

Interesting comment on the USA made CWC (CMC AKA) EP32 cams, I can't say as I understand that since they produce the VAST majority of OEM profiles. Every Chevy and Ford and Mopar came from the factory with those. WAY more load on one of those that a Toyota will ever see. The EP32's aren't "soft", they drop Rockwell test exactly the same as every other casting plant except for some newer ones we have seen pop up lately

I also know that the Chinese are working on it, they will get better in time.

We have seen a very few flat lobes ourselves, if we can get our hands on all of the stuff we can usually find the oiling problem. We now use a German blank supplier, and one in Japan. The fun part is that the ones from Japan are not made in Japan, they purchase them somewhere that I have not as yet been able to find.

(I have been trying...*LOL**...)

There isn't much made in Japan any more, to be frank. What is there is Japanese OWNED companies.

One point, cast iron (not steel) camshafts are poured into a mold before being machined. They will always be just as hard in the center as on the outside edge. Once on the cam grinder, the operator can tell at a glance if one is wrong by the color of the sparking flash. There is no way to miss that, any of them off go right in the recycle bins. Too hard also shows up instantly, same thing happens. We never see that any more, we also never saw that with the CMC inventory.

I believe that CMC sold their interests, not sure so lord knows. It's hard to keep track of who makes what anymore, they keep changing all the time. FM also sold out to a China company. I am getting a bit old now and don't travel around trying to keep track so much.

*Nearly always some silicone in an oil passage is the lobe wear problem , something like that. Sometimes the seats get ground so deep the valve spring tension drops off too far, things get to bouncing when that happens. We also see the rocker assemblies get rebuilt and number 2 and number 3 rocker stands mixed up which is an OOPS! That blocks off all oil to the far side.

One neat one we saw eat three cams in a row finally hit my floor. *No plugs in the ends of the shafts, they sure were nice and clean though...

A badly worn rocker arm will wear a cam lobe off real quick, too. When we went to 100% making the cams ourselves and refacing the stock rocker arms, cam lobe problems nearly vanished....*EB