I had a thread a while ago about a pin in my oil. It turned it to be the cam alignment dowel. The cam bolts had loosened up enough to let the timing sprocket wobble and knock the dowel off.

Now I have the dowel replaced, My question, how much damaged could have been caused by the cam walking backwards or forwards just a little and the alignment pin being out for a little while?

Car runs fine, slightly rougher idle than normal, oil pressure is always above 40 psi, but it ticks/taps like crazy under the car. You can't hear much in the engine bay but sitting next to a car I can hear the ticking bouncing off that car over my dual exhaust.

Luke

 

Anybody?

 

Ya can run a compression check on all the cylinders and see I ya got a bent valve and see the variation in the cylinders! It wouldn't take to much to make contact with a pistion!

 

Compression test is my next step. I started on the front two, both were at 160. I ran out of time but I'll be completing that this weekend.

Could the cam walking forward/backward do damage to the cam bearings or lifters?

Luke

 

There is about 1/8" of cam lobe front and back of the roller so I would think you would need more than 1/8" of front to back movement to get damage to the lifters. However, once you have that much movement the cam can bottom in the back of the motor. If it runs OK and you don't hear any strange noises, and you don't think it walked that much, I would put in fresh oil run it for 3K miles and then send it to Terry Dyson via Blackstone for oil analysis to see if there is something up.

 

I had my cam bolts loosen and my cam walked a bit. I had no metal in my oil and everything was okay after i buttoned her back up.