I have a ZZ4 shortblock with trickflow heads, carb, etc. The cam is a Comp cam extreme energy hydraulic roller with 230/236 @.50 110 lobe separation.
My problem is that I had a distributor with a steel gear and it got chewed up by the cam gear and slightly wore the cam gear. I installed a bronze distributor gear and the cam chewed it up completely. I am going to get a new cam and a new distributor gear but first I need to know why the cam gear is eating up and wearing out the distributor gear????
I am going to recheck the cam end lash but since it is a ZZ4 block it has the cam plate at the end so I figured a cam button would be useless. The end play is the only thing I can think of that would cause the distributor and cam gear to get wore out within 5k miles.
If anyone has any suggestions as to what the problem could be please let me know, thanks.

While I am on the subject I have one more question, the max lift for the springs on the trickflow heads is .540" is it alright to get a larger cam that has .540" lift or is it bad to run the max lift that the springs are rated at? This is on a daily driver car so the car will get plenty of miles on it.
Thanks for any help/advice.

 

Ask the cam maker what gear to run. It depends on the cam core material or the pressed on gear what dist gear you can run.
Once the gear had been eaten up and you put the brass gear on it there was nothing else the brass gear could do but wear out quick.The gears have to be glass smooth.

 

Check and make sure your distributer is not bottoming out on the oil pump shaft. Take it out and put it in without a gasket if it does not sit flush on the manifold you need some shims to raise it up. Mr gasket sells nylon ones.

 

At this point Id be more worried about whats floating around through my oil passages than I would be about the fix for the problem.

 

Luckily it wore slowly and when I cut apart the oil filter all the small particals were caught in there. I am going to install a new cam and a polymer distributor gear and check the gear mesh. Thanks for the input.

 

You might want to pump a few gallons of cheap oil thru the motor with a primer tool and with the pan off sucking only the new untouched oil. It never hurts to be extra carefull.

I've euchred two oil pans on one car I had a 2000 GTI VR6. I thought for some reason since they rally them in england they can go Dukes of Hazzard with all 4 wheels off the ground without issue. Well aluminum oil pans crack when you land on them and scoop up asphalt, that's another fun thing to clean out of the bottem end of a motor. Good thing is that the oil just drained out completely so I never picked up anything just had to wash down the crankcase. Still ran it for 20 mins and drained the oil out and changed the filter just because. As far as I know it still runs fine to this day.

Bret

 

lol, wish i could have seen a video of that one,


-john

 

Well my two passengers thought the whole 4 wheels off the ground thing was nuts.... to bad I didn't mean to do that.

 

you can always use of the new comp polymer gears which are supposed to be really sweet.. a friend of mine had the same problem on his LT1 it ate the stock iron gear, two brass gears all around 5-8k miles the new polymer has hung in there maybe it's a band aid for other problems?