OP
OP
Yes, this is increasingly my thinking as well. I don't know who actually grinds Roger's cams, so it could be a supplier issue at the root of it. And you may remember that one of the lifters I received was too big to fit into the lifter bore, so there is reason to suspect the quality of the lifters as well.
I forgot to mention that when I got the remaining 8 lifters out of the passenger side, all of them looked like new and rolled like new. Apart from that one damaged lifter, all 15 of the other lifters had zero damage to the rollers that I could discern with my 50-year-old eyes and reading glasses. Y'all saw the cam so I would have expected the lifters to be at least a little pitted since their Rockwell hardness is supposed to be significantly less than the cam.
My working theory now is that I essentially had three problems: 1/ The cam wasn't as hard as it was supposed to be and did indeed start receiving damage from the very beginning. 2/ I had 2 bad lifters - one never made it into the engine because it was too big, and another had a metallurgical issue that caused the roller to crack and lose a chunk under pressure. 3/ ~20% lower oil pressure than before the job with an as yet unknown root cause.
Given that I had 40-45 psi on cold startup and 15-20 at hot idle, it should still be sufficient for this engine. It never tripped the low oil pressure warning either, which it would have if oil pressure had dropped to a dangerous level.
Y'all may remember from earlier in the thread that the loud clacking noise that became a chirping noise with time, started when I made a full-throttle merge onto the highway. It makes logical sense to me that that was the point of failure for that lifter. Whatever caused the roller to fail, likely happened then. It follows that the failure happened when the pressures on the roller would have been at a peak, lending credence to the idea that the roller failed due to metallurgy or manufacturing defect, not due to a foreign object in the oil. The timing would have been miraculous if that were the case.
In any case, I'm feeling relieved to have the BTR cam and Morel lifters in the engine this time. I'm hopeful that it will run great and last many years and miles.
