Looking at a going with a MP .528 small block mechanical cam and lifter package. I know a few years ago there were some heat treat issues and they were wiping out pretty frequently. Has anyone purchased one recently and if so what are your opinions?

I haven't bought a Mopar brand cam in many years for several different reasons, mainly they have the cheapest vendor they can get grind them
Are you feeling lucky

Not only do they wipe but the rough cast edges on the lobes like to fall off the cam. I had tried to dress the edges of another mopar cam to prevent this and the rough edges didnt smooth off they just came off in little chunks.

So id consider the same specs in a different brand, OR look on ebay for one that was made long long ago.

If you search long enough you can find a complaint about just about any cam company "not heat treating properly." Bogus!


At least part of the cam wiping problems of the past decade have been because cam manufacturers have been pushing lifter acceleration rates closer to the edge, putting more loading on the cam/lifter interface. I myself have been quite vehement about using modern cam grinds with more area under the curve. A drawback that I mostly omit is that the new generation cams are more likely to wipe, everything else being equal.

It's a sure thing that MP buys their camshafts from a cam grinder somewhere. It has always been this way.

As a matter of fact, most items on a car that aren't the chassis/body and/or frame come from suppliers. Sure they have the car maker's name on them, that's part of the deal. The only cars that I am pretty sure most of the work was done by the parent company is Ford cars and trucks built by the River Rouge facility back in the day when raw materials went in one end of the building and finished automobiles came out the other.

Any lack or hardness or whatever on any brand cam is due to the cores being improperly heat treated and that's done by the company making the camshaft cores. You cannot expect the cam grinder to hardness test every single camshaft core.

So it's ignorant to blame a cam grinder for what the core manufacturer did or didn't do. Flat tappets are in the same category.

As far as the .528 cam, it is quite an old grind. AndyF has been very complimentary of its performance in stroker bigblocks running factory exhaust manifolds. So it can be a good choice.

R.