People talk about flat cams, but it's somewhat hard to explain in words. Here is an extreme example.

The left hand cam lobe is 'normal'. The right hand lobe is EXTREMELY flat.
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Here is a close up of the destroyed lobe.
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And here's the lifter, compared to an unworn lifter. Notice the height difference. That's a TON of steel filings floating around the oil system.
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no lube? excessive clearance?

hey, i know a guy who would reuse those ...

Andy

wow! once it gets bad, it gets REALLY bad, huh. did the guy notice he had to keep adjusting his valves by multiple turns of the adjuster screw?? that lifter is really short!

Just hope that's not your engine!

MCMark:

Did the engine really run with that bad a lobe????

If it did,what a tough little engine we have here. Dave

I have seen them, much, much worse... Totally round lobes are not uncommon with todays oils and generally crappy off the shelf parts.

This cam was ground on an "Integral" billet which were notoroius through 2004 to be the source of camshaft failures.

This cam was from one of my engine customers from everal years ago, it made it through all my testing here in the lab and then was driven for a few thousand miles before this occured, which is very odd because we caught about 1/2 dozen other failures (and repaired them) befiore the engines ever left my shop. Thiese issues are what sparked my cam/lifter testing which has led to a much better cam/lifter compatability since February of 2005.

Mark was willing to make this repair for my customer, which was only an hour or so away from him, but 2,300 miles from me... I have replaced the cam and lifters and will replace the other parts that were damaged with the foreign object debris floating around int he oil system- free of charge.

Yes, once a lifter/lobe gets hurt enough to cause rotation iissues things go downhill quick- that wear could have been experienced in two miles of driving or less.

Modern engine oils are killing our engines and causing accelerated wear issues, we'll be releasing a statement on this with mandatory oils for our engine customers and kit customers soon on my forums... All future RAT camshaft/lifter sets will come with an oil additive as wel as break in oil for the break in of the camshaft. This has been 3 years in the making.

will those lube items be available to folks that have purchased cam/lifter sets and have yet to build their powerplants? i don't care about a freebee. i'll pay for the stuff and the freight to get them here. i'm about 1 month away from digging in. major financial setbacks (other priorities) over the last year. i noted my vet is driving a new rig these days. just glad i could contribute...

k

I remember reading an article about this kind of stuff happening on other cars. something about the newer emissions compliant energy conserving oils not having the right ammount of zinc or something to withstand the pressures of solid lifers on the cams.

I've been running Valvoline or whatever was cheap that week in my 914 for years and it's still going strong. Why can't I get away with that on a new motor?

Wow!

Jeff, I suspect it is because your motor has work hardened the cam and lifters so they don't tear up like that. This can happen in the first few minutes of running...

Jeff, it's my understanding that your old motor has long since been worn in and seated and is therefore more resistant to poor oil. The new motor will still be 'getting to know each other' and so proper lubrication is necessary. Not to mention different metallurgical properties from factory cams vs. WebCam (I'd imagine). Have you read Charles' oil pages? It appears that Castrol GTX is a good choice.

The old cam that is in your engine now was work hardened with older oil, more than likely. The break in, burnishing/work hardening process is very important to a cam's life from the first revolution it makes...

New engines are very susceptible to issues at break in and thats why the newer oil that are not formulated to suit a flat tappet cam are killing engines daily.. Even if your engine has been alive for years, that Valvoline is taking it's life away one RPM at a time, more than likely..

Here is a post I made on a topic on a Type 1 engine forum where the topic has been very active.

Now for some direct experience:

I started working with these oil issues in 2002 after I lost 3 engines (in a row) to cam/lifter issues. I worked for the better part of 20 months and spent about 18,000 dollars to overcome the problems and get the cam lifter issues for the TIV engine solved.

What I found then was disturbing as this was well before many people knew that oils had been reformulated- including me. I even built a spin device that would be used to simulate cams/lifters/ oils/supplements in the best possible environment. It was made for quick cam/lifter swaps for better observation.


With this device and plenty of time, fuel, cams and oils I was able to find that there were 3 problems attributing to the failure and wear issues, I'll go over these below:

1- porous camshafts
During this testing I spent a lot of money on cams, and no cam manufacturer would give us a discount on their product for R/D purposes (perhaps they didn't want me doing the work!) so I ended up regrinding some cams as many as 3 times on the same billet to see what happened with different oils, different lobe tapers and lifter radii. The trend I saw was consistent and showed that the prorosity of the cam blanks was an issue, obviously the cam blanks had been chilled too quickly during the casting process and that made for a very porous blank. This porous blank, after being ran could be seen under a microscope to resemble a mountain range.

This porous cam blank automatically had more wear due to it's peaks and valleys and the microwelding that occured on each "peak"..... Now we'll leave off here and I'll pick up with this in the summary of the post.

2- poor quality lifters
Yep, they have the same porosity issues and about the time that we were doing our test work they were at an all time high crap rate. I used everything from NOS Johnson lifters to German OEM lifters, reground stock lifters, SCAT lose a lobe lifters, over 115 sets of lifters were purchased for what I did. Of all the things we worked with the lifters were the easiest to overcome, changing the radii and crown dimensions solved the issues for most all the lifters except those that were just plain horrible.

Most people never really understood that the dimensions on the crown of a lifter were just as important as it's hardness, they called lifters "soft" and blamed all the issues on them and still many do today. When I see the issues people are having and I see their pictures I see lifters that have no hardness issues, I see lifters that have crown issues and are not properly matched to the camshaft! Lifter manufacturers generally added RH to the lifters and hoped for the best, because most of them have no control (and don't give a damn) about what cam is being ran with the lifters...
enough on lifters for now- fast forward to oil.......

3- OIL!
OK, here it is straight..... For years I have LOVED synthetic oils, Royal Purple has been my favorite since I was sent a case of it before they even had their own labels! have went as much as 23,000 miles on a single oil change with it in my 912E engine, that engine now has 130K on the clock and has been purely abused for the 5 years it has been alive.

When I was doing most of my testing I used Castrol 20/50 dino oil for the initial testing and EVERYTHING we tried for cams/lifters showed the same accelerated wear. We didn't see any failures, but everything looked bad and sometimes after as little as 25 minutes in the spintron. The odd thing was the wear we saw then would never progress, it would simply stay the same. These patterns followed every cam and lifter we tested and the marks on the lifters looked the same pretty much no matter what.

I was working with a proprietary source (non VW related) that was making billet tool steel lifters for us, when he saw the issues and the way the parts looked he asked me if I had tried some different oils and I said no, and he then gave me a bottle of bright green additive that solved the weird wear issues immediately! He never would tell me what it was so I decided to have some tested and found out it had a strong concentrate of ZDDP among other additives in it's composition. I did a little more searchin g and found out it was a military spec additive used in gearboxes in M60 tank gearboxes...

Then of course at this point I found other sources for ZDDP (EOS) and started playing with it in the spin device, doingt his allowed me to fine tune the lobe tapers and lifter crown dimensions for our lifters that worked very well. After we got things fine tuned it was clear that the EOS and other oils were not totally necessary....

Fast forward to 2006 when I teamed up with LN Engineering to do a 3,450 mile trip cross country where we tested 5 oils that did very well in pre-run lab testing, having the highest levels of the crucial components that Charles at LN had found to be beneficial to our engines. Charles' Wife is a Chemical Engineer that really helped us out with the comprehension of what these things are in the oils and how they impact the running temps, metal/metal wear and etc- having Tammy on our side was truly a blessing... So the 5 oils were ran about 525 miles each with full data acquisition (28 channels) with the pre-analysis already completed (samples taken from the actual oil we were using in the car) and a stack of oil filters we were off.... I changed oil in truck stops, on the side of the road and at Art Thraens shop in Salt Lake City.....

Post analysis:
Of course when we drained each oil we kept oil samples of it and it's oil filter, these were sent in (un named) to separate oil analysis centers for a post analysis of the oils and filters. Having pre run analysis, in car data and post analysis lab tests we were able to see which oil did what and understand why it did this, this is data that no one else has and has never tried to accumulate for an old VW engine...........so........

At the end of the day one oil kicked the pants off of everything else we ran for wear metals and had average oil temps and pressures from the data acquisition. Some oils were better than others for running temps and even one of them (Royal Purple) made the car run much, much smoother and that was noted by me as well as the Engineer in the back seat running the data equipment and we could tell it immediately on start up.

After we got the results back from the lab analysis more testing has continued in the spin device as well as in engines in all my personal cars and on the dyno, all of this test work has continued to illustrate that Brad Penn Racing oil is the savior of our engines! It has time and time again showed less (as much as 80%!) wear metals in the oil samples and has been attributed to the best looking cams and lifters we have seen since the late 1990s. This oil is the "Old Kendall" and I'll tell you now that it has solved the questions as to what oil our engines like as we have used it in all grades and viscosities from street to road race and even drag race engines with great results with almost every running clearance.

With Brad Penn you can forget about needing EOS or other additives, just dump it in and if you pay attention you'll see the same things that I have over and over again.

So, the moral of the story is that better oils can absolutely spell disaster or success for your older engine, the Brad Penn works and it's also affordable. Stop searching for oils, additives and supplements, LN and I have spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours on this with aircooled engines ranging from the Porsche 356 to the Type 4 and nothing has been more effective than Brad Penn- period.

Rotella and the other stand by diesel oils are being reformulated constantly and since they are for passenger cars/trucks you can bet that their effectiveness in our engines will be diminishing continually as time passes. Brad Penn is "Racing oil" so it does not have to meet these new BS rules that are killing our engines....

Better oils can help diminish microwelding issues and mask the problems from incompatible crown dimensions/ lobe tapers... Many of the cam/lifter problems showed up when the oil changed and never before and there is a very good reason for that.

Run Brad Penn.
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This is a very touchy subject.. New cars today do not run flat tappet cams so zinc and other offerings that our oil needs is not available in the oils developed for these cars, most of it was removed for emissions reasons.

To totally do away with the chance of issues in my complete engines we are working hard to apply roller cam/lifter technology to my entire engine program by the end of 2007.

Yes, I have halted cam/lifter sales for the present time to make changes to the way cams are sold (too many people making component choice mistakes) and when the program comes back we'll have the oils and additives available. EVERYONE that has purchased a cam from us will receive a letter stating what is available and how to order it. The use of these oils and additives will be mandatory for all engine kits, camshaft purchases and complete engine customers.

Great reading Jake, you da MAN