Can I use a hidraulic cam with solid lifters, in street car??

Regards....Jose

I do not think you can though you can go the other way & you'll just lose some some lift.

You would loose lift using the solid lifters on a hydraulic cam. You have to subtract the lash. Even on a solid cam with a advertised .528 lift you have to subtract the lash giving you (if you have .025 lash) a .503 net lift.

Yep, did it with a .480 comp cam and run solids on it.

At the time I was young, dumb, and dirt poor.

Car had a 318 with 1.88 intake 360 heads milled .040, M1 single plane intake and 750 Holley 3310.

I'm guessing I probably had all of 7.5:1 CR in the loose re-ringed and bearinged shortblock.

Actually, the car ran pretty good for being slapped together and would RPM past 7k easily (other than throwing a belt once in a while.)

It weighed about 3,500 with me in it and ran 14's @ 95 mph with 3.23 gears, street tires and exhaust.

So, yes, you can run a hydraulic cam with solid lifters...

There was a guy that did this with his small block a few years ago. The engine picked up quite a bit with performance. But unless I'm mistaken, he set the valve lash at .000-.001" Being real carefull not to preload the lifters.

A solid cam has clearance ramps on the lobes to take up the lash. Most of the time the solid lifters will wipe out the hydraulic cam lobes.

wouldn't you want to set the lash at solid cam specs? I would think it'd need more for expansion the same as if you were running solid/solid.

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wouldn't you want to set the lash at solid cam specs? I would think it'd need more for expansion the same as if you were running solid/solid.

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How would you do this? Most solid cams have different lash settings. Like I said, I don't know all of the particulars of his set up, but common sense says that preload is "out" and some kind of lash is "in", what ever that may be. I would also suspect that the type of head would have an effect on the lash setting.
This is getting too complicating for me, I'm passing the tourch on to one of you smarted guys.

Just an FYI, I set my clearance at .018 intake and exhaust.

Thanks all, any other opinion???

Jose

The funny part about all of this is I was talking to a retired neighbor a couple of years back about this very topic.

He had owned a small machine shop in the little town where we lived.

He had no idea that I'd done what I spoke about in the above post but started talkin' about "speed secrets" that they did back in the day.

He brought up using solid lifters on a hydraulic cam as one of the "secrets".

I just thought it was kinda funny that I had done exactly what he had brought up.

I've seen it tried in alot of different "experiments". Out of about 10, 9 wiped the cam out. Dont know if it was a lash issue or not, but didnt work. We used to use hydraulics on solid cams alot to kinda bend the dirt track rules. Book said "No solid lifters" didnt mention the cam,they finally caught on after a while and fixed the rule.

When I was a kid this was supposed to be the 'hot tip' for a 216 Chevy. You used the hydraulic cam from a Powerglide 235 and ran the 216 solid lifters on it. Cam lasted about 15 minutes. My one and only exposure to this.