back in Jerry's days, most all the oils contained a lot of zink, you could most likely get away with-out a customary break-in back then, ya fired em up, broke em in between turn 2 and turn 3, drive it like ya stole it, take it to the strip, been there done that, that Was true, but the Worst thing you can do to a new cam these days is to run it at idle rpm's, low speed, for any length of time, especially when you run the spring pressure I do, and like Jerry did back then, on most oils available today, they have removed the zink, thats why every new cam comes with a cam lube, and the assembly lube the same. One time, only, I thought I'd be smart and used strait stp to lube the bearings, rings, cam, and guess what ? the starter would not turn the motor over, had to pull the car to start it, knocked a couple lobes off the cam in 20 minutes, never done that again, 1/2 stp / half oil ain't a bad idea, it works, but you still need some "slick-um" on the cam lobes to start a lifter/roller patern on the cam lobes for our boats, there is a Lot if idle zones. I run all my motors 1/2 hour on the stand before installing them in the boats, 2000 + rom, and goose it a few times in the break-in just for good measure, I want to know the cam and lifters are going to get along. It's nothing about making the cam harder, it's about getting a comfortable path for the lifters run on the cam lobes, slicker is better.
Thats why I tore down the stroker before I put it back in the gold boat, I wanted to see how it was doing, because when I was at lake of the ozarks I had to idle a mile up and after the run a mile back, even tho it's a roller cam, it bothered me to idle that long with a lot of spring pressure, I wanted to see it, there was evidence of spring pressure on the front side of the cam lobes, 125lbs seat pressure @ 320lbs on top of the lobe, but the patern was minor. I took the cam to the cam shop, he said the patern was normal, so I put it back in the motor.
Late model motors run about 85lbs seat pressure, thin low tension rings, and low compression, and they last a long time, but when you run a high compression ratio, 10 to 1 or 11 to 1, you got to have adequate ring tention, spring pressure, and, for our boats, a lobe center line that will not suck water into the exhaust chamber, quite different than a dragster with hot exhaust, that can run 13 to 1 or 14 to 1 compression ratio and a cam with a short lobe seperation, that can idle, radically, and because of the valve over-lap, don't starting to build horse power till it's turning more rpm than we can run with the drives in our boats.
