Thread: Wanting to give my 460 some pep!!

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well your old ? well NO i build engine and machine them every week so your telling me them bad cams coming out of them BBC and small blocks i have seen over the years are not bad ? i take a roller any day .your hoping your flat lifter cam lifters are going to say turning and there lube under the lifter foot to stop things going south .were a roller just rolls over the cam .i do not have to worry about the face on the lifter ground on the right radius . finsh on lifter face .junk oil . owner not breaking in the cam right . yep i stick with junk roller cams

Pat, I'm not trying to deny your experience. If you're an engine builder by profession, then you clearly have one over on me when it comes to seeing how an engine wears. Are you saying that on those engines with excessive cam wear, that there wasn't already some other reason to tear it down or rebuild it? I'm thinking in most cases it's already time to freshen it up, but I could be wrong. I'm just saying that for me, personally, I don't see the benefit of rollers if I'm not running steep ramps and high spring pressures. What's the cost-benefit analysis of buying roller tappets vs. buying additives anyway?

C'mon, kids, play nice or they'll take your crayons away!
Seriously, though, I have both rollers and flat tappet engines with 300K miles on the same cam. Then, too, I've had both fail in less time, some went south in no time at all. The critical time with flat tappets is the first minute or so after initial startup. If it fires right up with no problem and runs easily, and there's a good cam lube and zinc additive used, I have had no trouble at all with modern oils. Not to say rollers aren't better, just not absolutely necessary for a street engine.
As for heads on a 460, the C3's can be made to work well if you are rebuilding the engine anyway, just buy the pistons needed to put the CR where you want it and port the heads a bit to get rid of the restriction in the exhaust ports. And of course get a timing set that is straight up, not retarded like the factory ones.
It's not just the retarded timing sets that kill a stocker, the cams have a profile reminiscent of a Stovebolt Chevy 6.

My thinking is, as long as he is going in there and changing cams anyway, why not get the peace of mind a roller would provide? We are seeing so many flat cams going away prematurely these days that lots of people are adding $ 10 to every oil change because they are dumping in some additive to put back the stuff the oil companies are now leaving out. How much does it add to the cost to go roller cam? Maybe $ 200-$ 300 total? For me that little difference would be well worth it............no break in procedure, potentially longer life, and probably better performance due to less friction.

Don't take offense to this slightly spirited discussion we are having, if we were having it around a round of cold ones it would not come off as harsh as it does in print. We are just seeing a difference in philosophies here. On some forums this would be considered very tame.

Don