Steve
Do you remember which valves bent...intake or exhaust ??

Thanks Dale

 

i WAS enjoying mine til the valve dropped. should be done within the month though

Will

 

Timing can be off even when cams are correctly installed and also cams can be ground wrong. One of my Crower cams was ground with ground with gross error in LSA, 121 instead of 114. This reduced compression on one bank to 135 instead of the 165 on the other bank. When I later pulled the intake, the 121 LSA cam ports were still shiny, no reversion since that side had no overlap. The 114 side did have some carbon. Without degreeing both intake AND exhaust you will not find this type of error.

I orginally thought cams were just not degreed, but degreeing cams by intake opening events did not even out the compression. Assuming the cam was ground correctly was my mistake. Only found the problem when I checked the exhaust AND intake events. In process of installing new Crane cams since Crower would not replace the cam.

I THINK you will find most engine engine builders do not spend the considerable time to degree in their cams. Correctly degreeing cams requires adjustible timing gears and then the effort to properly degree in cams. Between cost of gears and labor, it would likely increase motor cost by $800-$1000, more than many would want to pay.

How many of you have adjustible cam gears installed? Degreed?
Checking bank to bank compression will help find gross errors. Have always felt this is part of the reason some motors run better than others, even when stock.

 

Good post BigBob

 

I will be checking compresion very very soon.

A side note on the Crower Stg2's I have in my motor were not even what I wanted, but after a mixup at the builders and delays followed by a slight rush to get everything going they were used. I might just be doing a cam swap because of that. Probably go with a set of Comp's

 

Good question Dale. On one side they bent and broke chain , so that side went all to hell. On the other side they just bent. Ill look for the pictures of that side. I could see where they hit the piston. The cam had very high lift, Modmax stage 3, over 600.

PS: Now I have adjustable cam gears.

 

Ok; my question is. If I swap cams and go with adj gears; don't I have to use solid lifters to degree in the cam gears?

 

Yes...you need two solid lifters, available from Anderson Ford Motorsports just for this purpose. You really don't need an expensive set of cam gears. Without getting into a long story...I just cut the drive key in the stock gear and then shim the back side key with a piece of shim stock to tighten it backup. Problem is you really should cut the key in a small mill to get it right, it saves you from having to shim both sides of the key. This method also requires a few tries to get it right but after a little bit of messing around you can figure out how much it takes to get what you want. If I remember right it took .004 off the key to get 1 crankshaft degree, but that is just from memory so don't quote me on that.

I learned alot about the "degreeing method" on the modular motor so if you need help just ask...getting repeatability is a b!tch but once you learn how you can trust your numbers pretty good and also don't do what I did and adjust and measure and adjust and measure only to find out after the motor is in the truck that somehow you managed to get the cams one full turn out from each other and only one bank of cylinders will run....don't laugh I really did this and it sucked.
Dale

 

Wellll; just an update

Did a compression test tonight and the results show a problem! On the passenger side front to back I got 158, 160, 162, 158 on the drivers side I got 128, 130, 132, 128 Basically the plus or minus on each bank is pretty close and very liveable. But the 30#'s difference from side to side won't work! I retested and got the same results. The side with low compression is the side that was running really rich.

This also explains the low power/poor track ET's and MPH.

Guess I am about to do a cam swap

 

Casey
Just a guess but I would say one tooth retarded on that cam.
Dale

 

Yup; that is what I am thinking too. Guess this is what I get for not building it myself

 

So what you guy's are saying is that a compression test will tell you if one cam is not degreed right? Once you get the data from the compression test how do you degree them? Also how to you time them after that? The gears come with a dot on them and the chains have a brass link. So do they time the same after the gereeing process?

Sorry for all the questions,

Peace,

Suavy

 

Well; mine was done by someone else. So, I don't know what they did really(that part sux's) It hasn't been running right, and I have went over everything I could come up with. Then the compresion test being off on one side shows something is screwed up.

This is a big screw up like the cam being 1 tooth off as Dale said.

Degreeing in the cams shouldn't be that big of a jump. We are only talking about 1 or 2 degree's out of 360 degree's. A tooth off is probably 5~10 degree's. Might be more as I havn't done it, but that is just an example.

 

those compression numbers are very similar to what Big Bob had. I'm sure he'll chime in when he sees this

 

What happened/what was the deal with his truck?