I took the opportunity to work with twelve of these amazing little engineering marvels and create a set of 1.6:1 (nominal) ratio rockers for our turbocharged engine.
They are case-hardened at the factory, so the first thing I did was take them to a heat-treating facility to have the annealed so they could be machined and welded. Then, after that was done, I returned them to the same facility and had them returned to their original hardness.
My motivation for doing this was two-fold: I wanted a total valve-lift of just over .500" for our turbo motor. No such cam was available. In fact, the reason it was unavailable was that since turbo motors don't work well with long-duration cams (thy don't like the overlap from such cams; it allows the boost to be blown out the exhaust valve) the cam grinders all told me that the angle of attack at the lifter/cam lobe interface becomes too great with (turbo) short-duration/high lift cams, causing the edge of the lifter to dig into the lobe and will flatten a cam in short order.
The most lift I could get, without going to a roller or a mushroom lifter, was .484". I wanted more. No roller blanks are available (for under $1,000.00) so that was out... and the engine was already pretty much together, so I didn't want to mess with mushroom lifters, sooooo...
The only way I could figure to get it was with some 1.6:1 rocker arms. The commercially-available, aluminum ones they sell were about $600.00.
I decided that I could get it done cheaper, so I got a set of stock ones and modified them by taking a .110" slice out of the backside and had them re-welded (t.i.g. welded.)
I haven't had a chance to measure the actual lift, but geometrically, with the measurements I made, it should be close to 1.6:1, which would give me .516" at the valve.
We'll see...
Here are some pictures...
