I will be curious to see how that cam works out for you Larry! Raylar has some neat (& $$$$$$) stuff.
Me too! Boy am I glad I decided to throw a cam in this engine! Let me tell you why….. This engine was a warranty core that has been laying around for 7 to 8 years. The causual failure was the oil pump drive, which breaks the drive shaft when the drive locks up. The pump drive basically takes place of the distributor where it supports the top side of the oil pump drive shaft. Same design as a 6.2/6.5L diesels. Back around 2006/2007 these oil pump drive failures were pretty common due to a supplier issue and the drives were on intergalactic back order so many engines were swung to avoid Lemon Law for days out of service. Anyway, knowing this engine had suffered the oil supply issue I dropped several rods and mains. All of the bearings looked great so I hoped the cam bearings would be too. Then I decided to add the RayLar cam and when I yanked the old cam I found the cam bearings were toast! They have huge burn out marks on them, especially the center bearing. They did not spin in the bore but the surface of the bearing look like crap. So it is a damn good thing I decided to install a RayLar cam otherwise I wouldn’t have known the cam bearings were toast until I fired it up and found low oil pressure. Also found one phuckered up roller lifter as well. The roller won't even roll till you tap on it on the bench.
The bitch of it is now is finding all the bits and pieces. The rod nuts are one time use only and so far I can only find 5 new nuts. I still need 11 more and GM has them on a 8 week lead time. Hopefully, I can find some on dealer’s shelves. I see Scoggin Dickey has some but they want a left nut for each rod nut. Lifters are easy to come by on Ebay but I played hell finding the right cam bearings as the Sealed Power M1404 (?) bearings Napa lists are not right. GM actually lists 3 different bearing part numbers to make up the 5 positions. The Sealed Power cam bearing kit uses one bearing for each position. That may have worked out fine but I don't want to take my chances running a high dollar camshaft on questionable aftermarket cam bearings.
12508996 Front cam bearing behind timing chain
12508997 Position 2 and Rear
12508998 Position 3 and 4
I also bought a set of head gaskets, 5 rod nuts and all of the seals/gaskets from work but I still need to buy head bolts providing we remove the heads while replacing the cam bearings. We’re hoping we can sneak the cam bearings in without yanking heads to pull pissers out of the way. If we end up pulling pissers at least I have the head gaskets here if we need them. We’ll see! I was hoping to get this engine installed over Christmas but this latest delay skewed that plan. Prolly be sometime the first quarter of 2015 by the time it is installed.
Oh, I also got a set of shortly Sanderson headers for it too. I am really anxious to see how it runs with a cam and headers compared to the blue trucks stock 8.1L. I am a 100% header hater so I hope these Sanderson’s make me a lover because I haven’t found a friggen header that I ever liked. I hate the leaks, burnt wires and fried starter motors that headers are so often responsible. We see how these work out. The headers on the 396 on my little hot rod 68' GMC have pretty much ruined me of headers
Which cam are you going with? I am considering their bp203 cam. I would love a set of their aluminum heads and to have my intake ported
Oh, me too. I would love a set of their heads and a reworked intake. RayLar Larry talked me in to a 202 cam as I wanted low end grunt with a strong midrange pull as well. The 201 is a major stump puller according to Larry at RayLar. It sounds like the 203 and greater are more hot rod cams, which would be cool but I believe those require an $adjustable valve train$ and possibly different springs. I don't even want to mess with adjustable rockers....the 396 in the '68 ruined me of that BS too. It is so nice just to torque a rocker bolt down and walk away like late model 7.4 and 8.1Ls.
