As some of you may remember, at the end of April my son (Mike) and I flew up to Seattle and drove the Yellow 73 2.0L back to Arizona. Things seemed quite well for the first half of the trip. The engine ran strong and temps were right where we expected them.

We stopped north of Bakersfield to catch a few hours of sleep and when we restarted the engine it was as if some alien had swapped the engine while we snoozed. It kept backfiring out of the left carb. As we headed up Tehachapi, the temps went right through the roof and we limped back to Bakersfield to see what we could do. Eventually we figured out that the timing was too advanced and the valves were all very loose. Even though it was better, it was clear that #2 cylinder was the one that was backfiring out of the carb.

Once we got home, I pulled the head and had it checked out by Competition Engineering. They said the head is fine, it may be a bad head gasket - but more probably it is that your cam has gone flat. That didn't make sense to me since only #2 had problems and I would expect its opposite to have problems if it was the cam.

Well, tonight I finally pulled out the cam followers. The one you see on the left is #1 intake. #1 exhaust looks just as good. On the right is #2 intake. Besides being wallowed out, it has a slight ridge on it. #2 exhaust must have a bigger ridge because I can't get it out of the case.

It looks to me like these cam followers were probably not rotating and had not been for quite awhile before we started driving the car. It's too soon to tell about the cam, but I'm guessing it's gone too. What is clear now is that since #2 exhaust wasn't opening far enough, the exhaust was getting pushed back out the intake whenever it opened.

So... the question is, how does this happen? I've never seen such a thing before!

Stock lifters on a WebCam will do it every time.. (I learned this the hard way 8-10 years ago) Same thing you see here.

What do we know about the engine ?? ANY receipts from previous rebuilds ??

B

The PO told me that he got the car with carbs already on it and a stock cam in it. He had the cam "reground" or replaced with something the shop called a "D10" cam. I've never been able to find out just what that designation means.

In hindsight, we now know why it loped at idle a little more than expected. At the time we just put it down to the carbs and the different cam since we had no experience with non-FI 914s.

Cam followers, or lifters, fell out of the engine while replacing pushrod tube seals, or they were taken out and inspected then not put back in the same place. Ask me how I know? no...don't...

Or the lifters were not sent to the machine shop when the new cam was installed.

Bad news...you have to split the case becasue that lifter is mushroomed and has probably trashed the cam and filled the oil sump with all kinds of little metal shavings.

sorry dude,
Mike D.

D10 is somebodies grind number.

Either way..the engine is coming apart.

Mike is correct in his theory also.. mixed up lifters would cause the same crap.

I'm actually happy to hear it didnt drop a seat and that I was WRONG.

B

So if you are building a Type IV and you replace the lifters with new as part of the rebuild then you should not have this problem? That's the approach that I took when rebuilding a 79 Bus 2.0L a couple of years ago.

I just want to make sure for when I rebuild this engine that I'm not looking for something else that would have caused just these two lifters to not rotate for even wear.

I'm glad too that it wasn't a dropped seat. That's what we thought at first, but it didn't fit with the condition lessening once we did the valve adjustment. Bakersfield is a long ways from Flagstaff so we were really sweating it at the time!

Type 4 engines have always been hard on cams. Recent quality issues have apparently made it even more difficult to get a good break-in.

Once the funky wear has started, the rotation tends to stop - the wear being the cause, not the effect. I think you are wondering if an outside influence caused the lifter to stop rotating and then wear. I think it happened the other way around, and a new matched cam and lifters will solve the problem.

A friend of mine had the same thing happen after a rebuild. Slowly the engine was losing power and he didn't know why. For some reason the rebuilder changed lifters but not the cam, probably didn't want to split the case. The old cam which had very old/hard lobes ate up his new soft lifters. After a while the rocker arms couldn't be adjusted to hit the valves.

Steel like camshafts which take a pounding everyday get very hard on the surface. Just like an old hammer vs a new hammer.

Paul

What the hell is up with this, my 4800 mile 2.0 has just pulled what I think is an indentical stunt.

I tell you something, it's costing me out the ass to make this little motor over, and over.



M

Ernie.. the problem lies: when people replace the cam and dont use the recommended lifters. I know a lot of cheap people who wouldnt pay the money for the WebCam lifters (no matter how much Webcam told them not to run stock lifters against their cam)... "oh ...BS..they just want to sell me lifters" would be their excuse.

Buy everything from one company. (WebCam was used for reference)


B