This is the second time a lifter has failed.....here are the details to my build.
07 Silverado 4.8 with 243 Heads.
- Comp Cam 228/228 .588/.588 114LSA
- .650" Dual Valve Spring
- Texas Speed 7.40 Chromemoly Pushrod
- GM LS7 Lifters
- TSP Trunion LS1 Rockers
- TSP 1-3/4" Stainless Headers
- FTI 2600 stall converter

First time thinking withing the first 100 miles a lifter actually separated and the roller ended up at the bottom of my oil pan along with needle bearings and more metal. That was on exhaust side of cylinder 8. Pulled the motor honed all cylinders, re-ringed piston with seal power rings, pulled caps inspected all seals/bearings, ARP studded bottom end, ARP connecting rod bolts. New oil pump all new gaskets, installed new cam, new lifter. Everything was good, tuned on the dyno, and around 3k on the rebuild heading to the grocery store......noticed a sudden loss of power and loud ticking....right away assumed another lifter. Pulled valve covers on drives side, nothing out of the ordinary, pulled passenger side, and cylinder 2 intake side rocker arm I could move it up and down.....it was correctly torqued at the moment too. I had a nice gap to put my finger in between the pushrod and rocker....so that tells me yet again lifter failure.....my question is, why and how is this happening? I'm in the process of getting ahold of TSP. Any information will be helpful, thank you.

First image is a picture of the lifter the first time......


This is the video of what I found when I pulled the valve covers the second time.

That is truely sad.... To get all my parts built is $1725.oo for the short block and $1749.oo
for the long-block & dyno.. and I bought every part. To have a lifter kill you is crazy... not once but twice... I choose a solid roller set-up with- OUT bearings as this does happen with all or most lifter designs..... BEARING FAILURE.
I would have bought a better lifters after the 1st problem..Comp cams, Lunat!, or Johnson short-travel lifter. Better products but these lifters also have bearings ...Get with Mr. TOOLEY about it...
2 Have spend on this again I would talk to 1 of the best..

BTW... Sounds like 2 much spring 4 that cam also...

Sure sounds like a lot of spring...I ran single springs(good to 610' I think) with that for years with a 110K miles car with the same cam! Bottom end let go before anything.

Are your pushrods the proper length? There has to be a reason you are having lifter problems. Whats the seat and open pressure on those springs?

Thank you for the replys. TSP really didn't know why and offered up a whole new set of whatever choice of lifters. I still have yet to tear the head off.......procrastinating and a lot of rain here in South GA. I'm hoping it didn't ruin the cam lobe...but more than likely did....more to come. As for pushrod length everything was measured correctly and TSP said if they were too long you would notice right away engine noise same with if too short.....not 3k miles later. For springs I thought so too but EFI Alchemy recommended duals and TSp said those will work just fine, but here are the specs for the springs;
Close: 144lb@1.810" installed height
Open: 402lb@.600"
Open: 425lb@.650"
Max Lift: .650"
Spring Rate: 469lbs/in

Oh it hurts reading this. I had a low mileage Lunati link bar lifter (same one as the Morel low end) fail and I'm in the process of rebuilding the whole engine too. The end looks like your second picture, Witness marks show the pin came out of the roller and snapped it off on the upstroke. The failure (just starting the car) took out the cam, cam position sensor, an opposing lifter, 9 valves and 5 dinged pistons (2 pretty good) along with needing the block worked to fix the lifter bores. High end lifters are out of my budget and the affordable choices all seem to have a poor failure rates.

402lb over the nose is not a lot of spring pressure in my opinion with this set-up. Not enough to be killing lifters.

I'd recommend a Morel 5315 or a Morel link bar 5290.

Did you use a push rod length checker to find zero lash during the installment of the camshaft?

So tonight I finally got off my *** and pulled the head lol.....guess what I found?! Looks like the lifter may have somehow spun 90° in the lifter tray because I pulled the tray lifter was 90° and some pretty good wear in the tray......and now I cannot pull out the lifter.....I stuck a camera down below and the cam lobe is messed up....any ideas to pull out the lifter? Otherwise I'm gonna pull the cam and have the lifter fall through....

And because of these lifter failures is there a way TSP or GM can cover the extensive damage?

Many of these failures sound like installation issues. When your beating up bearings and rollers are popping off something is wrong. To do it 1 time maybe you had a defective part, but to do it 2 times its more likely than not an installation issue. I would measure all 16 pushrod holes for proper pushrod length. The springs are just fine for that cam if they are installed at a respectable install height and how old are the springs? I would install those springs around 1.73" to avoid spring surge. Always use new lifter trays when doing a new build, unless you have link bars, which delete them.

So I pulled the other head off and cam out.....had to drop the lifter through the block since I was unable to just pull the lifter straight out. The first picture is of the lifter today....The second picture is both of the lifters...to remind you the 1st incident was exhaust side cylinder 8. 2nd was intake side cylinder 2. Everything was pre-measured no shortcuts were taken the 2nd time around since I had pulled the block.....Texas Speed did verify the picture of the lifter the 1st incident and indeed said it was a faulty part. Now looking at both of them together......looks identical. So as far as this happening a 2nd time and it is more than likely and installation failure....I highly doubt.....TSP will review the pictures of this tomorrow.

I have seen some lifter failures, but wow. You would have to grossly misused those in the wrong application for that to happen. Looks like there could be a faulty batch of ls7 lifters.

They both broke in an identical fashion so there must a defect of some kind in the metal.

Did the first one turn in the bore? That's why I refuse to use plastic trays. I went straight to a link-bar setup.

Not that I know of. The tray didn't have signs of it doing that either. This second time same way, just a little wear but not enough to show it spun....still awaiting a response from TSP

Hi Trevor

Sorry to hear this happened again, but I would seriously take a look at the preload and the overall install. I'm confident that we don't have a bad batch as I haven't had a problem with any other lifter in the past few months.

I'm even hesitant to send out another lifter and discounted cam at this point due to the fact if we don't find what is causing this it is going to happen again.

Again, yours are the only lifter failures I have heard about in the past few months. Keeping in mind we go through thousands of these every month. I would even go as far as saying I have only heard of 1 other failure this year. It is very very unlikely that you had 2 go bad, there has to be some sort of install issue.

If I can reasonably help, I will, but we need to find the problem first.

Dominic

If you keep the motor for a long period at higher rpm while lets say making a massive burnout you can have valve float and stress the lifter to failure

Aggressive ramp rates or a bad grind can be the cause

Or if you have a stick car making 5th to 2nd gear down shifts as the excessive rpm acceleration will cause problems

I would look at the cam grind as i too dont think this is a ls7 lifter problem if the above dose not apply to what you have been doing

i had 3 failures this way lifter turning.
I went morel link bars and ever saw problem again get rid of plastic trays plastic has no place in a hp engine.