RAM 1500 HEMI TICK Explained (Revised) - The Cause And How To Protect Your Engine

what is going on today guys my name is alex and welcome back to the channel today we are revisiting the hemi tick so i made a video about a year ago on the hemi tick and i want to revisit this topic because i just feel like that first video just wasn't good enough i think i missed quite a few points and so this time i've done quite a bit of research and i want to share with you guys what i found because i think some of the stuff i said in the first video isn't 100 correct so that's why we're going to revisit this topic and hopefully bring you guys some really good information surrounding the hemi tick so first of all what is the hemi tick um and now there are two possibilities when it comes to hemi tick the first one is not actually a mechanical issue it's an exhaust manifold leak it sounds very ticky usually happens on startup lasting anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute and those that are really bad will just continually tick what happens is that studs on the back of either manifold tend to snap off especially on the ram trucks for whatever reason and that causes a very ticky sound but it is not the hemi-tick what we are talking about is the hemi lifter failure what happens is the lifter roller needle bearings tend to fail and then what happens is that roller instead of rolling calmly along the cam lobe ends up smashing into the cam causing the cam lobe to wear down significantly eventually causing a complete misfire on that cylinder because the cam lobe can no longer push up the valve where it needs to go so that is what we were talking about when we talk about the hemi tick there seems to be a couple of reasons why people think these lifters fail now looking on the forms you can see all kinds of different reasons such as the mds system causing these failures bad oil causing these failures lack of lubrication which is what i talked about the first video causing these failures so let's start with nds system the multi-cylinder displacement shutdown system on these trucks so basically what happens is when you're just driving around town and you don't need that much torque or power this engine is automatically going to shut down to four cylinders saving you fuel i took it upon myself i went to the local dodge dealership here in town and i wanted to know whether or not the mechanics felt this was an adequate claim and what they told me about these lifter failures specifically on the trucks anyways is that they've had trucks with and without the mds system have lifter failures on them now they couldn't tell me specific numbers but they were pretty confident saying that it was about 50 50 split and so right there that tells me that the mds system really doesn't have a critical impact when it comes to these lifter failures now these guys from dodge they work on these engines every day and when they fail they're the ones replacing the lifters and the cam so i trust their opinion when they say that they think the mds system doesn't really have a critical impact on the lifter failures another common cause i see people talking about is the lack of lubrication now like i said i myself made a whole video basically saying that a lack of lubrication was the main cause of these lifter failures i do think it has a role to play but i don't think it's the sole cause of these lifter failures now one of the reasons why this reasoning has kind of taken off is because uncle tony from uncle tony's garage made a very good video talking about how he believed that um chrysler made a major design flaw with their third gen hemi which is this bad boy right here saying that there was an inadequate amount of oil getting to the lifter roller bearings and the cam which would then cause these lifter failures i would highly recommend you guys check that video out i'll put a link down below it's got some good information but i think there's more to the story than just that and we'll get into that right now another reason why people think these lifters fail so often is simply due to bad oil i think there's a little bit of a smoking gun when it comes to this topic and we'll dive pretty deep into it so firstly there's an article written by dave tracy i'll put his link down below you guys should check it out it's it's a wonderfully written article on and he has some expert testimony um within that article discussing various aspects of lubrication and lack of lubrication and and so on so we'll get into that right now so firstly what happens is he takes a failed lifter to an expert machine shop and what they do is they magnify the failed lifter roller and what the expert machine shop says is that it revealed scoring between the lifter and the cam lobe due to excessive slippage between the roller lifter and the cam due to the lack of stiction of the lubricant he goes on further to say that the surface indicates very little discoloration or pitting on the failed roller indicating that there was actually enough lubrication or enough oil at the time of failure but he also says that he believes that the lobe and lifter failure is likely a result of the type of oil used it's a lack of oil additives or oil breakdown which caused this specific failure so this is interesting because basically what they're saying is that this lifter failure was not because there was a lack of lubrication or enough oil present at the time of failure there it's indicating that there was a lack of oil additive that the oil had potentially broken down causing this failure over time oil breaks down its lubrication ability tends to fade the longer you use it now here's why i think this is a major issue with these trucks is because i know personally this truck it has an oil life meter on it i don't follow it because it's crazy it literally this truck told me to change my oil after 14 000 kilometers like eight months now i'm a mechanic so i have the luxury to know that that's a little bit crazy but if you were the average joe and just bought this truck you're like wow they must have made the engines more efficient or something you know people don't understand that you know oil as well as oil i can see oil going bad in these engines because people don't change their oil so it i can see how dirty oil could potentially play a really big role in these lifter failures so what i'm going to do next is get a little more technical and show you guys why i think bad oil plays a significant role in these lifter failures now another major oem research and development powertrain engineer took a look at these hemi lifter failures and he said that this could be caused by one of three things either lack of lubrication which we did already talk about bad material which we'll talk about in a second and excessive lifter clearance now you're probably wondering what does excessive what does excessive lifter clearance have to do with bad oil well the hemi engine uses a hydraulic lash adjuster most modern engines tend to use some kind of hydraulic lash adjuster in their engines reason being is because there needs to be some clearance between the camshaft and the rest of the valve train to allow for heat expansion between different moving components so in simplest terms the hydraulic latch adjuster uses engine oil now with the hemi engine is fed through the push rod into the lifter assembly now once in the lifter assembly we have a little check valve or a one way check ball here an engine oil is forced through there that engine oil then forces the lifter up against the cam and the cam lobe and this is what sets the appropriate valve train lash or how much clearance is going to be in the valve train is all set in this little assembly here and obviously this drawing is very simple now what bad oil can do is it can start to sludge up this check valve right here or dirt and debris in that old bad oil can start to build up on this check valve and that will slightly restrict this oil passageway and what will happen is that this lifter assembly the plunger inside will not be able to fully extend onto the camshaft or to spec now so although we're dealing with probably an extra couple thousandths of an inch of valve train lash it is still very important um so over here we have a beautifully drawn can and cam lobe and normally a lifter is going to start to lift right at the beginning of the lobe and now these loads are usually designed to have a very gradual beginning to the lift so to minimize impact when this cam is flying around where you gotta imagine when the engine's at let's say 3000 rpm this cam is whipping around so when this load comes around at speed you want a gradual lift right at the beginning right where it starts to make contact with the lifter now with this extra clearance what's going to happen is we're going to start to lift just a little bit later and what that means is that instead of having just a little bit of gradual lift at the beginning we're going to have much more impact as this cam is flying around and when we have more impact on the roller it is going to lead to some damage now we can even graph that exact example so here you go so here's your valve extension so you can see gradually we have a nice gradual pitch and then we really start to open up that valve and then again a gradual closing so this dotted line here is with normal valve train lash and you can see that the lifter is going to start to lift at a very gradual point and it's going to close at a very gradual point but when we have excessive valve lash you can see the lifter is going to start to lift at a much more steeper point there's going to be more contact more force here and again it closes at a much more steep angle so hopefully that makes sense to you guys how bad oil can either slug this up or debris in the oil can um slightly affect the one-way check valve in the lifter and therefore affecting your valve train lash which is what is going to give you that ticking sound when this roller is impacting the cam lobe instead of gradually opening it's going to be impacting the cam lobe so i do i hope that makes sense to you guys now if there is indeed more force at the time of contact between the cam lobe and the roller because again you got to imagine this cam shaft is whipping around even like at idling this thing's moving pretty quick and so instead of gradually lifting up the roller what it's going to do is it's going to more or less smack into it and so what that's going to do to the oil is it's going to deteriorate the oil much more rapidly and especially as you can see my beautiful drying we have the little roller bearings inside there and if that oil inside there is deteriorating at a very rapid pace these bearings are going to fail and that is exactly what we see with these lifters is that these bearings are failing now if we can take this full circle and we go back to our expert machine shop analysis where they said that there was indeed enough oil present but that the oil itself had broken down that the additives and the lubricity in the oil was not enough to take the force that was um you know put upon it by the camshaft and the rollers so we are starting to see kind of a picture here of what might be happening with simply having just bad oil the last thing i'll say about this is please use the factory spect weight of oil i know some guys like to run heavier weight oil in their engines because they think it's going to somehow preserve the engine or lengthen the life of the engine now in some cases that may be correct however in this case what we're talking about is if there is heavier engine oil it's going to take more pressure to give you the adequate um valve lashes that we're looking for so you may again end up with excessive valve clearance with heavier weight oil which is exactly what you don't want and again guys we're talking about thousands of an inch so you know if you're running an engine oil that's twice as thick you might end up with twice as much valve clearance here which is not what we want so just keep that in mind thicker oil in this case could be somewhat catastrophic and that is the reason why i think dirty oil can highly affect these lifters and eventually cause them to fail and just eat your camshaft so the last thing i'll talk about is the lifter quality i've seen a ton of stuff online talking about how the lifters themselves are the issue the chinese lifters you know they just aren't manufactured to spec properly the metallurgy isn't quite right and what have you dr andy randolph who is a nascar engine developer he talked about how he has seen personally lifters for this exact engine come out of the box brand new missing an actual roller bearing or a needle bearing pardon me and he goes on to further say that even if the let's say needle bearings or one of the needle bearings is out of spec by let's say you know one thousandth of an inch or two thousands of an inch that can cause a lifter to fail because that specific needle bearing going around and around it's gonna have much more pressure on it and then that needle bearing is gonna fail and then the rest are going to fail behind it so i think there is a point to say that potentially when these engines first came out the chinese supplier of these lifters may not have been quality controlling their products enough because as i said in the past ram has actually updated their lifters as of 2016. they went with a new supplier to potentially fix that issue so what is the conclusion here and i'm not going to say 100 that bad oil is the sole cause of the lifter failure but i think that bad oil um sludging up your lifters could be a very real possibility as to why lifters are failing on this truck you know faulty lifters could 100 percent be a real cause as well and like uncle tony said i think maybe the fact that the cam is mounted a little bit higher could also have a role to play that maybe there is some lack of lubrication at some lower rpm speeds i think all those probably have a role to play but i would say the main issue as far as what i can tell as far as what i've researched is that it could simply just be bad oil in these engines i think when the average person sees that they can run their truck on you know standard non-synthetic oil with a cheap three dollar filter for 14 000 kilometers and that is okay i i think that that that leaves you know some room for bad oil or dirt or debris to get into these small orifices in the lifters and cause them just you know to fail so i hope you guys enjoyed the video and i hope you guys maybe took something away from this you know i am not an expert or an engineer with these with these engines so take my word with a grain of salt this is what i found online this is what i've researched anyways guys enough of me blabbing on it was a longer video i felt like i really needed to dive into it and hopefully i got my point across and as always if you did like the video make sure you leave a thumbs up helps me out helps the channel out uh my goal is to get to 10 000 subscribers this year and if we do i'm going to take this truck all the way up north when i mean north i mean north all the way up to the arctic ocean next winter it's about you know i think it's a 3 000 kilometer drive chilly lots of snow it's gonna be tons of fun um so if you guys like that kind of stuff maybe think about subscribing that would be awesome and uh we will see you guys on the next freaking video

Channel: The Getty Adventures

Views: 96,041

Keywords: Hemi tick explained, Hemi tick cause, hemi tick sound, hemi tick fix, hemi engine problems, hemi engine noise, hemi engine bad sound, automotive repair, Ram 1500, how to diagnose hemi tick, 5.7 hemi problems, Ram 1500 engine noise, Ram 1500 engine tick, ram 1500 engine oil, ram 1500 engine issues, how to protect hemi engine, 6.4 hemi tick, hemi lifter noise, hemi lifter tick, hemi cam issue, hemi, ram 1500, hemi tick, is the hemi 5.7 a good engine

Id: sOH4DCOn0uw

Length: 17min 4sec (1024 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 10 2021