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Sun Jan 01, 2006 2:04 pm

No valvefloat and about 3100 miles. Were brand new and resurfaced to promote better lifter spin. I have chevy valvetrain and use GM eos with Rotella t 15w40 with lotsa zinc for antiwear.

look at the brittle material closely and its obvious this happens to everyone.

Sun Jan 01, 2006 2:09 pm

I think I'll steer clear of the Scat lifters from now on.

Sun Jan 01, 2006 2:11 pm

Damn. And those were SLR'ed too?

Thanks for the pictures. SCAT needs to get their shit together.

Sun Jan 01, 2006 2:30 pm

Actually those are CB splats that have been reground like an SLR. I've heard people having phenominal success with Scats but oddly enough every single motor I've seen cracked open with those lifters have same exact results. Mind you they are street motors with idling. But also pits like those do happen to guys that drive 1/4 mile at a time for drag purposes.

As you can see all of the lifters are developing hot spots in the center of the lifter. If I kept them in longer they'd all have horrible cam eating pits.

My point is you can candy coat a sour lemon but eventually you'll get the lemon. Ultimately a treated lifter will meet its match and result in the same exact statistic as everyone else using brittle flaking crap.

Those are not lube a lobes. V8 theory is that a hole is meant to cool the cam and lifter but they dont have the "shower" of a bath of oil from a crank in an aircooled flat 4 platform. Also we dont usually have the seat pressures and full lift pressures of a performance v8...not usually anyways.

I'd say these pics are not misinformation. Its what I have experienced and so have tonnes of others. Man I dont even want to see what my splats look like in one of my old 2110 w/ W125 engle cam with 10,000 miles.

I was just playing with my camera and thought I'd share with some detailed pics.

Sun Jan 01, 2006 3:41 pm

Have you got your set of Udo Beckers yet?

Sun Jan 01, 2006 4:49 pm

wheel607 wrote: Have you got your set of Udo Beckers yet?

2 sets of schubeks and 1 set of Udo beckers tool steel. I'll be putting together my new setup DPR 84mm shortblock with the Udo's in the next month or so. Not sure when I'll run the engine. Gonna run my org/blk (riosulense) brazilian lifters in my other 2332 for the part of the warm season. I am sometimes debating if I should use my ceramics. Wont be spat though!

Sun Jan 01, 2006 7:12 pm

Alan,
why take a risk on eating more lifters and/or a cam? Why not just throw the Schubecks in?
Seriously, mine are just a big waste of money when sitting in a box...I can't imagine your two sets are worth any more unless you actually use them :wink:

Sun Jan 01, 2006 7:39 pm

I have three scats in my possession that look like yours. They came out of a friend's motor that we suspect had valve float from low spring pressure. I'm taking them into work to our metallurgist to have him cut them up and mount them to look at them on the microscope. I should have pictures in the next few days. Makes me want to tear my 0 mile motor out of the car and apart to change the scats before I ever run it.

Mike
59 single, 66 bug, 69 bus, 73 super
Member of the Ddk

Sun Jan 01, 2006 7:54 pm

Many years ago I use to work at a place that did heat treating to mostly aircraft parts. I feel that the problem with lifters that are plagueing the VW's could be due to the way everybody breakes in their engine upon initial start up. I think that maybe people should look into the break in procedure more as to a possible way to cure this problem instead of just simply blaming it on the lifter manufacture. Cams are not hardened like a crankshaft is. The engineers rely on a method called work hardening to burnish the cam and lifters together. The firts few minutes of engine break-in are very critical to the hardening effects of the cam and lifters. Heating cycle of the new part could be the answers, not what chemical you put into the oil.

Sun Jan 01, 2006 9:45 pm

You can't work-harden a turd. There is a problem with the quality of lifters, both metalurgy and machined tolerances. The issues are not isolated to VWs; the V8 crowd has been experiencing flat cams and lifters, too.

Sun Jan 01, 2006 10:49 pm

I did the voodo dance, single spring, 20minute cam/lifter breakin....cool down and ran another 20 minutes for hell of it. Made sure I had oil pressure with no spark plugs. You name it I did it all before and it still had the exact same problems. 99% of the same problems stems from the lifter itself.

Tools steel seems to be a kickass solution to longevity in a valvetrain issue. The Ceramics are also the way to go with attention to valvetrain health and no valve float.

I have heard of people exploding splat lifters with k800's. I haven't heard anyone exploding an old school wiezman tool steel so I'll give the udo tool steel a shot. My schubeks are a 100% success rate so no challenge or thought there.

Sun Jan 01, 2006 11:14 pm

Hi For our less learned guest's like Me. :D Can Someone explain the different lifter's we are talking about? and where we can get them? is Splat short for scat? :shock:

I've always used the billet lifter's the Cam Mfg. recommended IE. Berg (20 Years and Min. 50K) in single cab.
or Web Cam. I have a set of web cam billet and a Set of Scat and the web's are far better, heard they were the same.

Mon Jan 02, 2006 12:18 am

I'm being sarcastic. Yes scat.

Webcam billets are virgin untouched scats repackaged. Yours will look exactly like the ones I had regardless of cam/lifter breakin.

Mon Jan 02, 2006 3:46 am

vwracerdave wrote: Heating cycle of the new part could be the answers, .
The temperature extremes encountered in an engine during operation are far too small to have any heat treatment effect on a cam or lifter.

Mon Jan 02, 2006 9:59 am

OK, so Scats are to be avoided, this includes Webcam lifters. I'm going to be installing a Webcam 86B with Bugpack S/E heads and Autocraft 1.5 rockers. From what I have read on this fourm the ceramics and tool steel lifters are very expensive - $500 and up (BTW, where do you order these from?).

Is there a less expensive but reliable alternative for a hot street drive car (7000 rmp limit)? How would Gene Berg lifters or stock Brazilian work? How about the new CB light wehights?

Mon Jan 02, 2006 11:08 am

John Connolly is also testing some new "slightly lighter" lifters that may be from the same source as CB's. He doesn't have any results yet, but says they will be inexpensive. He sent a set to Web for them to evaluate and they approved them for use with their cams.
These may be another source for the Web cam users like myself.

Jim

Tue Jan 03, 2006 6:57 pm

Well I talked to the metalurgist at work today. He cut the lifter that was pitted the worst and put it into a mount. The lifter tested at 67HRc. The lifter started cracking across the face of the lifter underneath the surface then turned until the fracture got to the edge and popped out. We're not 100% sure on the mode of failure at this point but leaning towards too hard combined with pounding from valve/lifter float. If anyone wants to see the pictures let me know. I would post them here but they are in a word document and I am not sure how to get them to a basic jpg file to post here.

Mike

Wed Jan 04, 2006 10:23 am

martyrg wrote: OK, so Scats are to be avoided, this includes Webcam lifters. I'm going to be installing a Webcam 86B with Bugpack S/E heads and Autocraft 1.5 rockers. From what I have read on this fourm the ceramics and tool steel lifters are very expensive - $500 and up (BTW, where do you order these from?).

Is there a less expensive but reliable alternative for a hot street drive car (7000 rmp limit)? How would Gene Berg lifters or stock Brazilian work? How about the new CB light wehights?

I run O.E. German reground virgin lifters in all of our high performance street engines(including my own car) and do not have any of the pitting problems associated with other lifters. By the way, I say reground virgin lifters because I only regrind lifters that haven't been ground before. If they have been previously ground, I throw them away.

Wed Jan 04, 2006 11:37 am

This is a classic example of non compatible cam tapers and crown radii.

In my experience, wear that starts in the center of the lifter is a sure sign of a crown with too much radius for the lobe taper.

This is the way it starts, and once it gets to this stage the wear progresses drastically. This lifter was removd from a test engine every 30 minutes, then inspected. This wear was noted after about 4 hours of run time in the spin device.

I finally cured the TIV cam/lifter issues with this type of testing/trial/error but it took almost 18 months to do it.

from what I have seen everyone is too worried about lifter/cam hardness to find a solution for the TI issues. Hardness is important, but surface speed and point loading are the big keys to unlocking the problems.