How many times have you had that happen Jay? That would get under my skin real quick....
Just a couple of times, back in the 80s. The worst one was with a 429 SCJ engine. I had a fairly strong hydraulic cam in the engine and of course the cam manufacturer said it would run to 7000 RPM, so after I got the engine together and in the car I took it there a few times. For some reason, after the first few times it wouldn't turn much past about 5500. Then one day the engine just quit on me while driving down the road.
After getting back to the shop I discovered the distributor wasn't turning. Took it out and the gear was stripped. Looked down the hole and the cam gear was stripped too. Pulled the oil pan and took out the pump, and it was frozen solid. Disassembled the pump and there was this tiny little steel wire jammed in the pump rotor; it had fed up through the oil pump pickup screen and lodged in the rotor, jamming the pump and breaking the gears.
Next day I took the pump into my machinist's place, and asked him what he thought about the situation. We were both puzzling over where the piece of wire could have come from, and just concluded that it must have been a foreign object that got into the engine somehow. A week later, though, my machinist called me back. He said, "That wire is just about the size of the wire they put in hydraulic lifters to retain the plunger."
After that I pulled the intake. Six or seven of the lifters had the clips popped up, so that the U part was still in the lifter, but the ends were sticking up out of the lifter body at an angle. And, of course, one lifter had the clip completely gone. It had clearly popped out of the lifter early on, and was mangled by the reciprocating assembly on its way down to the oil pan. Finally a piece of the wire fed into the oil pump, and that was that. Pulled the head on the side where the lifter clip was completely gone, and the exhaust valve that was controlled by that lifter was slightly bent and had obviously been hitting the piston.
Being a slow learner (
) I went through a similar situation a couple years later with the 428CJ in my '68 Shelby. This time, though, when the engine quit wanting to rev past 6000 RPM, I parked it and pulled the intake. There were a bunch more of the clips popped up, and two missing clips. I found them both in the oil pan, then removed all the lifters and put hardware store C-clips in them in place of the wire clips. Never had a problem after that.
FWIW, knowing what I do now, I would never try to rev a hydraulic cam to 7000 RPM. I've never seen one make power on the dyno past 6000, so what's the point. Most of them I've tested peak in power a lot lower than that. Back in the day, if I couldn't rev to 7000 RPM I wasn't cool, so I had to do it
Now I know better...
