[RichSchmidt]

Everybody blamed the problem on low quality Mexican lifters during the "lifter shortage" a few years back.Now you mention low quality cams.Every cam manufacturer seems to be aligning with the quality of new oil being the cause of the problem.I never had any problems with any of the flat tappet race engines I have built over the last 10 years despite the fact that most of them are out there being whipped to 7500rpm within less then 1 mile of fresh assembly with no break in other then a 20 minute warm up and an oil change.Somehow guys with $100 a set lifters on .450" smallblock street cams with synthetic oil are tearing up cam lobes even after careful break in,but I run $60 a set stock replacment speedpro lifters in our race stuff and dont even break it in and nothing fails.As for valve lash adjustments,it might make sense but 3/4 of these failures are on hydraulic cammed engines anyway,and the truth is that any street engine should be able to go years between valve lash adjustemnts if the engine is built right.I have about 500 runs over 7 years of racing on my current 427 with a .620" lift flat tappet cam and I checked the valve lash 3 times,and the last time I only did it out of curiosity right before I swapped out the valve springs.Never once did the valves actually need adjustment,but thats a whole different story.

Here is a great story about this.I got a call last summer from one of my racing buddies who had a freind who wanted to know why his 454 street rod engine ate 2 cams in one year.I told my friend that there was a good chance that it was the oil he was using,and my friend called me back and told me that I was full of crap and he had the best mobile 1 oil he can buy in the engine.He replaced his otherwise fine running very low miles 454 with a brand new GM crate 454 because somebody told him that old 454's had lifter boss alignment problems{at which time I mentioned to my friend that I would like to know how such a badly aligned block ran for 300,000 miles in a pickup truck before it went into a hot rod}.after it was all over,the guy tried to get crane cams to warranty the cam so that he could put the engine back together and sell it,and their first question was "what oil were you using"they sent him a new cam because they admitted that they werent advising customers of this problem at the time he bought his cam,but the fact is that nobody wants to believe that $7 a quart oil can actually be bad for your engine.