Thread: checking v8 camshafts

If you know what the lift is for both inlet and exhaust lobes you could measure that. You could still measure them and see if any are obviously too low. You would need at least a vernier.
Cheers Hall

It really seems that with these engines acceptable wear is next to nothing, and a midlife cam change is the way to go if you have any doubts about it.

Originally Posted by Davo

It really seems that with these engines acceptable wear is next to nothing, and a midlife cam change is the way to go if you have any doubts about it.

so what is midlife?

mine is over 300,000 going strong.
thats a bit over 186,000 miles, so what's the problem.

it would help to have the full maintenance and use history of the engine to be fair about why it needs replacement parts,
mine is going on 17 years old,
at 50 kph for 300,000 it has run for 6000 hours out of a possible 6205 days, roughly 148,920 hours.
so since birth, it has sat on its arse for about 142,920 hours corroding from all the contaminants in the oil and crankcase.
not to mention all the starts with time to get oil pressure, driving off without proper warm up, short trips that don't warm the engine enough to burn off, or boil off the contaminates in the sump,
and to add to that , i have driven it hard often since about 150,000 km's.

i think these are good engines for what they do.

the perhaps bad reputation is a misnomer due to the age of the general fleet.

Well, in other words, if the engine is old enough for you to have doubts about your cam, replace the cam.

Because you often find with these engines that while they start well, idle well, run well, and have good oil pressure, when you take them apart they're shagged and it's the cam that usually goes first. The V8 seems to be quite tolerant of wear and people don't notice as performance very slowly deteriorates. Then they put in a new cam and are impressed by the engine's sudden new lease on life.

Thanks for your help guys . Today I got in and checked every lobe first visually through the valley and I could see three lobes definitely badly worn . If I measure im guessing the lifters on the other lobes are lifting say 4-5mm but 3 worn ones are only 3mm .
So I went ahead further and removed the camshaft and you can clearly see the 3 lobes that are somewhat flattened out if that makes sense .
New cam and lifters to organise now !