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Reply to "Hydraulic roller lifter issue?"

The weight of the higher spring rates will not matter much at all except to give your valve train more rpm potential.

I would guess that it is highly unlikely that you will put 100,000 miles on your car.

It should have no issues with those springs in the normal usage of a very high performance vehicle.

The added load on the lifters and cam lobes with the heavier springs really doesn't matter  with correct lubrication.

The concern is that you need to be sure of the capacity of the push rods and if you go to a flat lifter camshaft, that you use a sufficient amount of ZDDP.



IF you are going to look around in considering valve train changes, you might come across the term "shell lifters".

Those were used by Ford in the 427's for higher rpm potential. Essentially what they are, are lightened lifters, i.e., lower mass.

Those typically were used with the sodium filled valve stems.

The combination put the 427 into 8,000 rpm capability EXCEPT for the valve springs which were limited at the time strictly to 7,000 rpm.



There is an entire side discussion about that with the development of the MkII GT40's for Lemans. There Ford did a 24hour crash test and determined that the maximum safe rpm of the engine for that race was 6,200 rpm.



So yes, there is a contradiction there in why would you put in 8,000 rpm components if at most it is safe for 7,000 rpm because of the valve springs, etc.

I can only envision a scenario in which different components were assigned to different engineering teams for development and the spring technology people just could not keep up within the given time frame?

The spring issue has been resolved. It was in the alloy of the spring steel which we now have.



incidentally, when NASCAR outlawed the big block Fords and the racers went to the 351c, there was issue of valve spring failure early on.

The racers solution was to submerge the valve springs in oil within the valve covers. I'm not sure of the exact procedure to accomplish this but it did involve restricting the oil return to the oil pan in a way that the valve covers would fill up with enough oil.

The submerging in oil was "cooling" the springs so they would not loose temper.

Last edited by panteradoug
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