heres a great example of a seriously worn lifter , from an engine that wiped its cam on break-in, where do you think all that metalic trash went?,and (trust me IT rarely only one lobe) look closely at the sides of that lifter.....notice the wear the trash in the oil did even durring that brief time!


this is a good example of why ID also strongly suggest adding 4 of these magnets (below)(these are NOT your comon magnets ,ONE will pick up a sbc cylinder head)
http://www.wondermagnets.com/cgi-bin...catalogno=0035
to your engine as they do a great job of trapping and holding metalic trash in your oil, preventing it from reaching your bearings, and NO ,before you ask, the OIL FILTER RARELY traps more than about 90% of the trash in the oil in a single trip thru the filter and the bye-pass circuit tends to open slightly even with new clean filters under hard accelleration

I normally place one in the rear of each cylinder head and one on the bottom of the oil pan near the drain, and one near the oil return in the lifter valley, to trap trash if something fails.
you won,t believe the trash stuck to them after a few months, on even an engine thats running perfectly, but on an engine with a cam and lifters that fail they can easily be the differance between a total loss and a rebuilable core

BTW something to read
http://www.cranecams.com/?show=article&id=2

 

In over 30 years of putting engines together, I've never wiped out a lifter/lobe. Maybe just luck, or maybe not putting together maxed-out combos.

Out of curiousity, what was the cam lift, and valve spring open/closed forces?

 

Sometimes they just go, no fault of the installation or mismatched parts. I had also been lucky for 2 decades and then wiped half the lobes off a Comp Cam 282S during break-in. Not wanting to accept that I did anything wrong I had the cam Rockwell harness tested. It came in at a 25 when it should have been up around 55. The cam core was never hardened (it was manufactured incorrectly). It was doomed before I ever stabbed it into the motor. It happens, albeit rarely.

 

Great, I just stabbed a 282S in the 396. . .

 

I ran a 282S with 1.6 rockers in a small block once, for more than a decade and well over 100k miles.

I don't think you should worry too much about it, five7.

 

I use magnets everywhere. oil filter, oil pan, trans pan[epoxy if aluminum], rear end, fuel filter......tossed one in the tank when it was open......

they are also very helpful at trigering signal lights. Some times motorcycles can't trigger them being all aluminum. So ya glue one of them big suckers to the bottom.