How To Pick Your Camshaft 101

I have a general idea of what I *THINK* I want or need as far as what the head flows, the CR, header size, gear ratio, transmission type and ratios, clutch or converter and some other stuff.

Then it's the cam grinders job to either say yup, you're on it, or he tells me I'm completely off the reservation and smoking hippie lettuce.

The last cam I bought I new I wanted to net .600 lift (that's about all the lift you can get on production rocker gear) and I was 100% sure I wasn't going to accept a split pattern cam that reduced intake duration, added exhaust timing and blows the LSA out to make the shift RPM the same as the correct cam. That I want having. That's stupid. Especially with a stick car. Three times you drop down to the torque peak (you should be anyway) and have to pull that back. Reducing intake area and adding exhaust area and opening up the LSA is a mid range killer. For all the whining I hear about bottom and mid range power, and yet they let cam grinders convince them that that method is the way to go. It's stupid if you want an engine that spends most of its time in the middle. Why give that up? Because most guys don't want to learn to tune a carb. Most guys take the easy way. And most cheap EFI systems don't like a cam with "tight" LSA's so they get compromised on cam timing.

It takes a lot to convince me I'm overboard on what I want. I can be moved a bit here and there, but I've been doing this since the 1980's and I've seen all this dual pattern, 4 pattern, wide LSA's and that type of garbage.

If you have production based cylinder head architecture and you are running more that a 108 LSA I'd bet everything I have and some stuff I don't you are leaving power and driveability on the table.

My very BEST W2 and W5 stuff, my BEST stuff with 55 degree seats on the W5 heads and more work into them than a reasonable man would do, all that, and the widest LSA I ever ran was 109 and I though that was two degrees too wide. I'd have given up a bit at 8800 to get a touch more in the gear change.

Just my .02 from years of breaking crap and fixing junk.