I was curious, you guys with a lot of experience with race stuff, which have you seen more of , retainer failures or valve lock failures ?

i've experianced both. retainer failure due to incorrect heat treatment of the retainer material & lock failure due to valve bounce from under rated springs. i'd say lock failure would be more predominant.

bump..

The biggest problem we see is the mismatched use of retainers and locks.

as in 7 degree / 10 degree?


Or the locks just dont fit certain retainers. I assumed if the retainer and locks are 7 degree and meant for, say a 3/8 valve , it will be fine. I know theres diff size retainers for diff springs ...

correct me if im wrong of course

ok , thanks fellas

I work on around 70-80 sets of heads a year or so, so I get to see alot of new/used stuff all time. Only broken LOCK I've seen in past few years was actually a brand new Comp611 11/32" with lash cap recess. It was on a new set of heads I had just assembled & was going to put on a motor I was building.... Well I needed to check something with checking springs after I had assembled the head, so I pulled pair of valves out of #1 cylinder to put the checking springs on & when I popped the locks out the one came out in 2 pieces... brand new lock busted just from being installed & having some load put against it. This was in a Comp 1731 tool steel 10 degree retainer. The grain structure of the metal looked horrible. Every once in a while you used to get a pack of locks that had a broken two piece unit in there.... Does'nt give alot of faith as to their metal quality.

I talked to one of my parts suppliers who is big into the valvetrain business about it & turned out he told me Comp had gone to a new offshore supplier for their 10* locks a few months prior to that set I had got. Needless to say that was last Comp lock I have used, I started getting them through a private source that has them made at Precision in NC, I buy in sets of 320 at a time & get real good pricing as well.

Hav'nt had any broken retainers in few years.... & the ones I have seen definitely were not setup right. Have seen maybe 5 or 6 broken springs here & there. Again usually operator error or some of that stuff was on sprintron Nascar heads that had 1000's of miles of spintron testing on them.