I am starting to rebuild my 84 305HO. This is a daily/street car, nice little vert, no racing in it's future.

The cam I chose is a comp cams 218/224 retro-fit hydraulic roller, with new valve springs, pushrods, roller lifters, timing gear and chain. I plan on using roller rockers, likely a 1.6 ratio, but have read that some ebay pieces may be better or equal to procomp or other brands.

Summit racing has Proform 1.6 ratio full rollers for $240 https://www.summitracing.com/parts/p...maro/year/1984
Ebay has Chinese 1.5 ratio full rockers for $120 https://ebay.io/m/T07kFn

Half the price for Chinese stuff, but how does the quality compare? Honestly the Proform doesn't have great reviews. Any suggestions or recommendations?
Let me know if you want or need any more details on the rest of the build to give better guideance.

 

Personally, i wouldn't use a no name product inside my engine. If a rocker falls a part it could send metal through out your engine and make a hell of a mess. I have the chevy roller rockers that are rebranded crane or crower. If you wanna save money on stuff, do it on the outside of the engine. Id consider ebay valve covers to try and save money way before RRs

 

 

I've had high end stuff fail but mine is also a race engine. Chinese stuff is good for show but not great for reliability. You get what you pay for.

 

Certainly possible. However:

Somehow I doubt that something that's Chinese that costs half as much as something ALSO Chinese (or Malaysian or Pakistani or Vietnamese or ...) is going to prompt you to give it any better reviews. Not that ANY of those people can't, or even necessarily don't, make decent stuff; just, they don't just up and make stuff out of the clear blue for no reason whatsoever, and the reason they DO make stuff like that, is because somebody HIRES them to do so; and anybody that seeks out the absolute lowest possible labor cost that way, is more than likely seeking out the lowest possible cost for everything else about the product as well.

The fundamental rule of money IS NOT "you get what you pay for". That's only part of the complete saying.

The WHOLE rule is: "You get, AT BEST, what you pay for." Never forget that you might get LESS THAN what you're paying for, maybe even ALOT less, especially if the person you're buying it from is less than honest.

Meaning, if you pay for the least, you get, AT BEST, ... . You fill in the last 2 words.

With all that roller stuff, you're into 4 figures EASY for the valve train so far. Why cheeeeeeeeep out at this point and take unnecessary risk?

Stick with 1.5 ratio. On a 305 with stock heads, there's no sense in putting on 1.6 rockers. The distance that the valves open isn't The Bottleneck; the valves themselves, particularly the 1.84" intakes, are. Think of your engine as a pump (which is one of the 2 things that it really is), and the whole induction system - carb, intake, intake ports, int valves, exh valves, exh ports, manifolds/headers, exh pipes - as being like a string of pieces of hose that the pump has to pump through. Do a thought experiment where you've got a tank or something out at the far end of your back 40 that you're trying to fill up. You've rounded up every piece of hose you can find and hooked it up to the faucet on the side of your house. The tank is taking FOREVER to fill because the water is coming out the end of the hose so slow; turns out it's A FRACTION as fast as it comes out of the faucet itself. Hmmmm... the hose must be A Restriction. You look at your hose and see that you've got 50' of 5/8" hose, 25' of 1" hose, 100' of ¼" hose, and 50' of ½" hose. Now: if you replace the 25' of 1" hose with 1½", how much faster will your tank fill up? What about 2"? 3"? Won't make ONE DAMN BIT of difference, will it? As long as that 100' of ¼" is in there, it DOMINATES the degree to which the string of hoses restricts the water flow. You can increase EVERY ONE of the other pieces to 4" and you won't get ONE DAMN BIT more water coming out of it, will you? That's how your engine works. It's not "additive", like you buy this cold air intake and it "adds" 15 HP, and that fart can muffler and it "adds" 25 HP, and these other snazzy gimmick spark plugs with 17 electrodes each and they "add" 10 HP, and pretty soon your 90 HP motor "adds up" to 160 HP or whatever, butt strangely enough, it still loses the passing wars at traffic lights to soccer moms in minivans. Engine mods simply don't work like that. The only way that your car will get any faster using that approach is due to weight reduction centered on the driver's wallet. To get faster, you first IDENTIFY the one thing keeping it slow - which might not even be under the hood at all, might be gears or suspension or torque converter - and address THAT. If you think that the engine's power output is inadequate and you want to increase it, simply bolting on new big shiny easy-to-get-to pieces sitting up on top, is probably NOT going to do it. Since HP is energy production per unit time, and energy production is limited by how much fuel you can burn which in turn is limited by how much air you can flow, and FLOW is amount of air per unit time, it's OBVIOUS that to increase HP, you must increase total flow through the engine. Which takes us back to the hose analogy. If the valve opening distance isn't The Bottleneck in your specific instance, then all that increasing valve lift will do, is stress all the parts involved unnecessarily and uselessly. In a word, using your own money as a weapon to shoot yourself in the shorts with.

 

The reason I asked was exactly the answers you all gave. I wasn't sure if Pro-form was a high quality brand and just had bad reviews, or if it really was a bargain basement thing. I certainly don't want to cheap out on parts to be cheap, but didn't want to buy brand name junk, either. Trying to be wise about where to spend the money on for the most bang for the buck, without, as you said, shooting myself in the shorts!

 

Absolutely. As one should always do. No sense spending extra money on something that doesn't do any good.

OTOH it REALLY bites to buy something, then it turns out to be a turd, and THEN having to spend money AGAIN on something else, quite likely the thing you might have bought in the first place had you not been seduced by the low price of the turd. That hurts.

 

Sofakingdom is absolutely correct in the engine/water hose analogy. Wish some of my auto tech instructors years ago had the same wherewithal to describe power production.

I have the pro-form rockers in 1.5, and they are not great. The anodizing is flaking off, which I am certain isn't good for the other parts in the lubrication system, and they constantly need adjustment or they get noisy. That said, I have not had any catastrophic failure with them in 50k miles.

I will end up replacing them with the comp cams magnum rockers at three times the cost as I am tired of having to adjust the valves every year. The pro form rockers are functional but that is about it, I believe the factory rocker arms are better in most aspects.

Buy once, cry once. Buy twice, spend a whole lot more money for no gain.

 

Thank you for this personal review. They look good, but if the anodized stuff is coming off, then that does not sound good.
Trick Flow is a more reliable brand, correct?

David

 

Anodizing is aluminum oxide which itself is kinda clear, then tinted (or not) with trace quantities of other oxides.

Aluminum oxide is the most common material used as the particles on sandpaper.

That's what's running around in your engine oil. Literally, sandpaper.

I had never really thought about it, butt that's just one more good reason NOT to use aluminum rockers, on top of all the others.