morning everybody it's Bart at high-tech motorsport Elk River Minnesota and we're launching right now a how-to video got a lot of requests for camshafts on LS one so we're gonna do LS one LS 2 LS 3 L 92 camshafts I want to tell you why things work and why they don't this is a video that's for people that want to get the correct camshaft for their application not for people just want a bunch of noise and the stuff doesn't work so stick with me a little bit I'll give you all what I use all the way through with these recommendations and why things work and why they don't but it's going to be a little longer than then my editor wants to do so there you go okay so the LS one whenever you're picking a camshaft our goal is first to look at what you're doing with the application do you have a truck do you have to pull a skid loader is it a car that's a Firebird Camaro Corvette that's going to be used for pleasure and kind of high speed off on the track type stuff or is it a pure race car everything makes a difference because the camshaft design will change the characteristics of the car or truck and the way it works okay simplicity if you've got a truck 5.3 so they came in four eight five threes five seven six oh ohs and six twos just bigger cubic inches the goal here is to maximize horsepower and torque and efficiency for your application so don't get carried away when you end up putting a big camshaft and then it doesn't work one thing I'm going to talk about is the cylinder head flow numbers and it a camshaft design you've got lift okay you've got duration and you've got overlap and centerline but we're gonna skip centerline here to the very end we've got overlap there's three basic main things the easiest one there is the lift everybody makes such a big deal about lift that's the least important when you're looking at a cylinder head for example the ls1 cylinder head I always write down the flow numbers I've got my cheat sheet here we're gonna put it up on the on the graph oops we're gonna put the graph numbers up these are my cylinder heads I work with all the time and because I can't remember every I've got the flow numbers and the percentage of flow from intake to exhaust all right that's very important with with camshafts and how much duration and what you want to put for the different lobes as far as is a 224 lobe on the intake and 230 on the back it depends what the actual percentage of flow is between the two okay so these are up beyond the bio to screen the ls1 camshaft at 600 lifts kind of flatlines maybe goes up one or two CFM but at 600 it's 230 CFM 193 on the exhaust those are numbers I've measured over time and I've verified it with a bunch of other tuners across the country so when you're looking at any configuration of what you're doing you can take the CFM on the intake x - okay that's 460 plus 10% I put you like 505 510 whatever that is that is the maximum amount of horsepower that that cylinder head can make no matter what the cubic inches are in any application so for example if you've got a 5 7 car if you put a camshaft let's say - 26 to 32 in it which is one of the ones I use for 4 Firebird Camaro no matter what you do you're only gonna be able to make that much horsepower I'm gonna how hard you spin it and there you can you know guys be like oh yeah I made an extra 8 horsepower still don't care but when you get when you're trying to put a bigger camshaft in then what maximizes the amount of cubic inches and the amount of cylinder head all you do is end up with a soggy camshaft that runs crappy down low gets poor fuel economy and doesn't work very well all right continuing on with this stuff so the lift is easy 600 600 600 I did all kinds of work with cranking up the lift down lift taking the exhaust and knocking it down try and get better flow on the exhaust side overtime didn't make a whole lot of difference and it's in simplicity sake what you want to do is you want to go over the maximum or close to the maximum flow number for the intake side and the exhaust side and just put the lift up there don't get carried away so LS cam is going to be a 600 610 lifts whatever it might be and the reason that you're trying to do that is we know that it continues to flow up a little bit higher but the springs become kind of unstable and we're just gonna go from there now one thing I want you to see is the difference between the lobes because that's really important too we're gonna put this book up a little online at least some of the stuff for LS this is the comp cams engine builder book that has the lobes in it it's the most important part here is not the duration but actually what the flown duration is at 200 lifts which is when the the valve is off 200 thousands so we're gonna put those up so you can see the difference in these different cam lobes that's not something you're gonna see out of most places because don't give these books like to everybody because it's confusing alright so you're already at 600 lifts now camshafts the bigger the cubic inch the more cam you can get away with to feed it and they run better so if you put the same cam let's say one of my favorite cams and here's your here's your key I use a 223 227 600 600 and on a 113 for five three trucks I've moved that configuration around I don't know 30 times over the last ten years and this is the absolute best as far as making horsepower and torque and you'll notice when you go down the road in a truck you're gonna be doing about 1,800 rpm at 60 65 depends on gear ratio so you've got to make sure the camshaft works at least a little bit at that rpm otherwise the thing just doesn't pull right and your fuel economy is a damn disaster it's just pretty darn important so 223 227 600 600 a 113 we'll end up making four and a quarter horse and 425 foot-pounds of torque I like square motors because they tend to run and pull really good but once again with a 5 3 you've got 327 cubic inches so you know that with 327 cubed was the best you can hope for if you've watched my other videos one and a half horsepower per cube which puts yet 480 500 which is just about perfect for that cylinder-head now can you make a little bit more with some port work and that type of things sure but for the most part all you're doing is grasping at straws trying to make things work that don't really want mechanically go there there's always a limiting factor in your engine always whether it's cubic inches intake manifold exhaust manifold throttle body somewhere back in the muffler section where it's blocking whatever it might be there's always a limiting factor but if you can get the camshaft set up so it's gonna want to make one and a half horsepower per cube or close to it and 1.3 to 1.4 foot-pounds of torque dissolve the crank you got yourself a winner the problem comes in when somebody puts a big camshaft in the truck let's say a to 36 to 46 it ends up running really poorly and gets crappy gas imagine while I pull its way out of a wet paper bag and people are very disappointed so let's get you on the right step there same thing with the four eight the baby cam I usually Nick that down by two degrees so instead of two twenty three I'm running at two twenty one and two twenty-five the extra cubed the extra cubic inches to the five three helps the motor pull a little bit better it will actually work the cubic inches work the camshaft and cylinder head better then the four eight the forty eight works just fine so then you go to the five 7 which is Corvette and six oh they got the ls1 configuration Cathedral ports I use a bigger cam there because most time they're used for either a street strip application or a nasty street I have done road race cams so the one I always use in the five-seven for guys with spirited driving skills is I'll use a 226 - 234 600 600 and I'll put it on a 112 Loeb set now we're gonna go into lobes up here a little later how it looks and how it works but that camshaft works really good for people that want to be shifting up at about 6,500 it'll maximize cubic inches it's a little fussy down low and gives you kind of a grumpy grumpy idle but it's work to proven to be a really really good camshaft over time and still you can work it with a stock convert without major issues likes to convert a little bit better but not a big deal when you get into something that's a bigger say a 408 cubic inch Ford and Stroke six liter the LS 1 cylinder has really kind of restricting I did one of these back in the early days of my own Corvette we tried putting a big camshaft till we did did get the thing to make 625 horse at the crank the problem was it was so fussy down low even with a stick it was miserable to drive now with Jack the bear up the racetrack but it was a bad cylinder head even though he cleaned him up to work with because the cylinder head was maxing out not that the cubic inches we did make 1.5 we're open for better than that so if you're gonna road race that type of stuff that one did have a 242 252 in at six and a quarter six and a quarter and we put that on a 111 don't recommend that one that's that's a bad it was a kind of a bad choice we ended up changing it out later on but that will get you around the racetrack and a heck of a hurry but only works from about 3500 6500 or 7000 so be aware of that situation okay now we're gonna get to the meat and potatoes and why that works so you've got all the cliffnotes right there if you want to jump off the video that's fine if you want to learn more here we go so your roller cam configuration I'm gonna pull these up right here this is your flat tappet cam is the old fashioned see how that's pear-shaped right there no pear shape so the lobe comes up real soft and there's not a lot of not a lot of duration up here at the very top or your valve is flowing a bunch here's a roller cam this is a stock roller cam it's not even one of the nasty ones it's got the new lows see how this lobe is very aggressive going up that's because you've got rollers right there so we can take advantage of the roller lifter that you can't with a flat tappet and the big thing is in this block from cop they've got roller lifters that are really really aggressive so you can have your take cake and eat it too you can have a short-duration cam still fills a cylinder head and fills a cylinder to maximum and you have a nice big fat torque curve of good idler characteristics and maximize your cubic inches that's what we usually shoot for your at high-tech okay so now we're gonna get into the part about lobe separation and what goes on lobe separation is simply put it's the top of the log to the top of the loma now when you get bigger lobes you end up with the web steps SAP stays the same but your overlap comes more because the lobes are bigger now when that happens you get a poopy idle and things start to come they get progressively worse for idle characteristics but they work better up high so when you're looking at the lobe steps so if you've got a cam let's say that's for for easy sake to 30 to 30 degree and put it on a 112 and then you've got a cam that's at 220 220 and put it on the same 112 that thing is 10 degrees difference and overlap I call true overlap there's a website called Wallace racing and they've got a great camshaft event calculator and also it shows with two overlap is now I've got six or seven cages and put some of these up of cams I've used in cams that I've looked at and that shows what the true overlap is and usually for a truck you want to be true overlap between minus one and plus one that works the best for trucks they're trying to pull anything and for stop that's spirited street you want to be anywhere in that three to five degrees a true overlap the more overlap you have the fussy the idle so if you're looking for something that sounds like John Force idling in the pits all you do is you end up increasing the overlap a little bit the car becomes more aggressive sounding but you're also losing cylinder pressure the goal here is to trap the cylinder pressure that comes in from the intake manifold lighting it off make power then shoot out the exhaust to find balancing act and the ls1 cylinder head does a pretty good job up to about 500 horsepower maybe 525 after that it's pretty well defunct that's we're going to get into the ls3 the LS Tucson has is pretty much the same as an ls1 as far as numbers not a lot of difference here so anybody doing an LS one LS to these camshafts will work for you now there's always questions that come up within take center line advancing or retarding and the guys that are doing camshafts that are really big and they'll do like a 236 252 and put it on a 1/16 and then they'll advance it like six degrees all they're trying to do is put the timing events back into play you have the thing sound like a box of rocks which everybody thinks is sexy to me it just sounds like you're kind of Wisdom fuel away and then they'll end up it's it's really not good for anybody but that's what a lot of people do you don't need to do that so when you got the cylinder have the LS one which you can refer back to the numbers the LS one cylinder head flows 193 CFM on the exhaust side at 600 that's about 84 percent so it doesn't need a bunch of extra exhaust to get get the exhaust flow out of the way remember you're trying to trap cylinder pressure at any given rpm to make power the more cylinder pressure you can trap the better off you're gonna be as far as making torque and then horsepower at the top because horsepower is just a mathematical figure its torque times rpm and divided by a constant which is 50 - 50 gives you a horsepower that's why every dyno graph you see better cross at 52 50 or somebody screwed with it just be aware of that little situation it's just a mathematical form that somebody came up with long time ago what it really means I can't really tell you it's just an ability to do work over a given time so let's go over a couple things one more time first thing is take your vehicle out go down the highway see what you're doing at 6070 miles an hour what RPM are you add things got gears are big tires you're going to have to change a camshaft to work better a smaller camshaft you've got big-ass tires and a heavy vehicle 5,000 5,500 6,000 whatever towel is suburban will work better with a smaller camshaft for everyday use and for don't run down the strip second thing is you've got to figure out what the what you're gonna use the vehicle for that's critical on that so if you think you're gonna go to racetrack all the time great tear the seats out tear the radio I'll take the plates off of it take the AC off of it everything comes off it well if you're saying well I can't do that because I've got to drive it to work that's not a race car so don't get a camshaft for a race car that you're not gonna actually race it won't work well and it'd be unhappy third thing is don't try to make the cylinder heads do something they won't do back in my day with the old 202 Camelback heads we had to use big camshafts because first of all we had flat tappet cams they were kind of crappy for the amount of duration they could do it two hundred and the cylinder heads didn't flow diddly they'd flow like a hundred and eighty CFM 185 CFM no matter what you did with those ports they were crappy so we had to use big cams trying to try to make sure we could band-aid a bad cylinder head the better the cylinder head the less camshaft you have to use to make the maximum power of the rest of the combination of the cubic inches so a great cylinder like the ls3 or the Hemi head we're going to talk about a little later is 100 CFM more all the way across on the intake you don't have to use that big a camshaft to maximize the amount of cubic inches and the horsepower you don't have to have some that runs crappy had to make all the horsepower all it does is run crappy so then the question comes up when you're buying a camshaft use a little thought process and go over what you're really gonna be doing with the car and then talk about what you want to do and what you want the thing to sound like when you get done you can change the overlap a little bit to get more rally grumbly rumbly idle but don't get too carried away at 223 227 cam for a truck on a 112 makes all the noise that most people want put it on a 113 it'll make a little bit more torque down low but won't quite pull the sixty sixty to sixty three hundred but that's my number one go-to cam five seven car mostly came in production cars you can work with a tooth to 26 to 28 on the intake side and go to a two 34 to 36 on the exhaust put that on one 13 Wallace racing a look at what the overlap is decide what you want to do listen to clips on them on your YouTube videos if you have any questions you can send me an email Bart at high-tech motorsport calm and I'll converse with you I do get a hundred and fifty emails a day I just want you to know that if you ask me if I'm sure about stuff the answer is I wouldn't be telling you this if I wasn't sure about it I've had a thousand cars on the chassis dyno the LS motors in a different configuration I do these things every day so yeah I'm sure about what I use doesn't mean I'm a hundred percent correct but it means I've done a thousand of them so it's probably more than the guy sitting next to you with a bag of Cheetos downstairs with his own computer going nuts remember if you're ever in doubt take the smaller of the two camshafts and that will make you a little happier than taking the big camshaft people always want to go bigger and better so if it's really Biggers always better watch this to a 360 360 600 600 and put it on a 104 and then the car won't run see I'm getting at here it's all a matter of airflow and how the air wants to react with the number of cubic inch you've got in your application so that's a little bit of a rambling video but I want to make it as simple as possible to get you can give you guys what I use and we'll talk about this a little bit later if we're gonna recut a few spots here near what we're gonna do but be aware of people out there trying to sell you the wrong camshafts for they're you know through their cash flow doesn't make it right but that's what they're gonna sell you so be aware Stage five cam and a truck is not a nobody knows what a stage five is that's the funny part even I don't call things stage fives don't get it anyway send me an email you can always call me also but I've I do get over a hundred phone calls a day I try to get back to everybody if you leave me a message seven six three seven one two nine zero eight eight is Barton high tech motorsport in Elk River Minnesota have fun picking a cam
