I pulled out my factory camshaft on my 91 Z28. I seems to have a lot of wear on it. I can see copper on the first three cam bearings. I hate to put my hot cam in with tore up bearings. If the bearings are shot is the rest of the bearings in the motor shot? I sure hate to waste my hot cam over this. The car has 134,000 on it. I am debating to pull the motor out and see what everything looks like. I still have the cross hatches in the cylinders. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, BranT

 

Cam bearings often show a certain amount of wear. That's fairly normal. Rather than just that, look to see if there's any debris or metal chips or anything anywhere on or around the bearings, and if there's any scratches in the bearing surface. As long as there's no sign of metal in the oil you're probably OK.

Also, if the motor has good oil pressure, then the cam bearings are good enough to swap the cam without fear of that kid of failure.

Even if the motor is wasted and you do wipe out the cam, the cost of a new cam compared to a motor rebuild is minimal. But from your description of the cylinders I'd bet everything's OK.

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"So many Mustangs, so little time..."

 

I would tend to disagree. If you can really see the copper coming through significantly on the cam bearings, i would see about replacing them first. Don't waste alot of effort, and your new cam $$$. More than likely what you'll end up with is really bad oil pressure once your cam has broken in,and the chance to do it all over again. =) Trust me, i've made this mistake. Better safe then sorry... Just my opinion tho.


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When I replaced my cam I discovered that the cam bearing (at least the front one) didn't look so hot. But since my only other option was pulling the engine to fix it, I decided to just put the new cam in anyway. That was 16,000 miles ago and I haven't had any problems. But it's hard to say if my bearings were as bad as you say yours are.