Alright guys I am going to be ordering the GM Hotcam at a discount...What all do I need to do to make this swap happen? timing chain, springs, retainers, and so forth....Also where is the best place to get these? All help is greatly appreciated.....thanks

John

 

I believe the GMPP Hotcam kit comes with everything you need, springs included. You won't need a new timing chain or anything with the hotcam, it's a very mild cam. You might need a gasket kit. Just check out the kit on GM Performance Parts' website and see what all is included. You don't need a lot for the hotcam just the springs which it comes with.

 

looking at your mods it seems you have a great platform for a cam, why waste it on the hot cam :shrug:

but to answer your question seeing as you have an 02 your pump and chain are fine. only change them out if you desire to. you can get a pump/chain/cam gasket and bolt kit from TSP for around 250.

 

It's not that mild. You will need water pump gaskets, air tube gaskets, etc to install. And do yourself a favor and buy valve seals so you can install the new spring seats.

 

Well I can get the cam only at a great price using my brother's discount...I also have a ported throttle body that has the hole in the blade drilled out for a Hot cam so I thought well why not....I will be tuning with a Predator hopefully and I do not have any experience tuning so I thought that the hotcam on an m6 would work out good....What do you recommend for me JRP if I want to step up to a more aggressive cam and have no tuning concerns.....thanks

John

 

I wouldnt get a hot cam to save money. You can get a used cam like a thunder racing 224 cam or a lunanti b1 cam for around $200 and some 918's springs for $150. They will make more power and torque everywhere over the hot cam and have better drivability.

Only get the hot cam if youre lookin for cam that will let the springs live 100k miles. Or want a good nitrous cam.

 

so the hotcam would be good for boost later on down the road?

John

 

You should research a custom ground cam for a boosted engine. A boosted engine will do well with a split duration (short intake and long exhaust) and as sharp as you can get the ramps without chomping valve springs all the time. Lots of lift would probly be nice too.

 

go to www.sdpc2000.com and get the cam install kit. it comes with all the gaskets and pully bolt etc. the cam comes with zo6 springs and retainers. do a serch on the retainers for that tho. i ended up having to get some different retainers than what comes with the kit. i got the stock pushrods and havent had any problems with mine, but you might wanna get some hardend ones. i got a new timing chain. think thats about it. have fun with it.

 

with the hot cam you get all the driveability and tuning issues of big cams but only get half the power. the hotcam is not a plug and play cam like say an ls6 cam. the hotcam is also not the greated n2o or boost cam either. bout the only thing its good for is its slow ramps are easy on springs. you didnt specify your goals or application so i cant recommend a cam for you. best thing to do is take the time out and research. dont just buy the hotcam cuz its "cheap", your doing yourself a big disservice.

 

A couple of the local guys here have the hot cam and they're pretty happy with it... it does sound pretty good and the cars with hot cams did pretty decently on a canned Predator tune. But as JRP said, it does behave like a bigger cam than it is. In fact, on one of the local cars, it sounds pretty similar to my 231/237 cam... except his has a little more valvetrain noise from the 1.8 rockers he has. I'm also running on the canned Predator tune for the time being (have a custom tune in the works), and my 231/237 doesn't have any worse idle qualities than a hot cam on a similar tuning level.

 

Hotcams are what you make of them. When I first installed my cam it was like starting up a 70s muscle car. Hard lope cackling through my headers. It sounded mean as hell. It also drove like a dog for awhile. The first thing you have to do is adjust your throttle blade and reset the TPS. Then you are going to need to add a little idle speed and maybe some timing down low. From there you can do a couple things. You can change your low VE and scale it down for a quick (and very streetworthy) fix, or you can drive yourself crazy like I do trying to fine-tune out the very least bit of surge. My last few hotcam tunes I have saved are very very easy to drive on the road. It runs almost exactly like stock (no bucking anymore either). I just haven't smoothed my fueling out like I want (very picky, most drivers wouldn't care) and of course surging at low throttle/low rpms (only a barely noticable amount...probably wouldn't notice in an A4).

 

First, you should always mod your car to make you happy. You are the one that has to drive and hopefully enjoy it. Second, I would reccommend putting in as many new parts as possible when doing the swap. I had the timing set, thermostat, oil pump, valve seals, ASP pulley, LS6 intake, and Hotcam kit done at the same time. I figured why have to go in and pull it apart again later. The car had 64,000 miles when the cam was changed.

 

1) you may want to ask some people on this board what 3 arm puller to get for the crank pulley. I had to try a few different ones.

2) I got a rollmaster double roller since I was already in there and it is one of those super awesome parts you could put on a coffee table

3) valve seals so you can install the new seats that come with the kit

4) I used the JPR lifter tool from thunder and it worked awesome to hold up the lifters

5) I used one of those crowbar looking valve spring compressors from autozone. I can definitely see why people have broken bolts off in the head with them. I figured out how to modify it to work WAY better
https://ls1tech.com/forums/tools-fabrication/195158-valve-spring-tool-mod.html