Solid cam damage diagnosis help
I wouldn’t totally condemn Howard’s until I had “the conversation” with them.
If they said, “we grind the cams with the taper like that because that’s what Hughes wants”....... I’d give them a pass on it.
If I got the “that’s impossible” speech....... and they didn’t ask to see it...... well, that would be the end of any recommendations for them from me.
It’s not just the 7 thou taper. It’s that it was ground incorrectly for a Chrysler. I dam sure know Hughes didn’t spec that.
And yes, I’d call Howard’s and talk to them. I know, for a fact (without naming names) that if you have an issue with a Hughes cam and call Howard’s they will say Hughes sends us pallets of cores and we grind them like Hughes tells us.
I’m betting they’ll pass the buck because Hughes low balled Howard’s, and to get them to grind his stuff with enough meat on the bone so he can make a profit he told Howard’s he’d deal with all the issues that crop up.
I’d bet everything I have, and a lot of stuff I don’t have that this can’t be a one off cam. Howard’s can’t make money grinding single cams. They have to do it production.
They have some joker standing there banging out the same cam for hours on end. That means there’s probably more than one of these out there. And I’m betting Hughes and Howard’s know it.
Or, this was the first cam off the grinder and the guy setting it up missed on the first cam and rather than throwing it in the scrap, or grinding a different lobe on it just sent it out and didn’t give a crap.
Just my guesses as to how this happens. I’ve worked in production (and HATED it) and I caught a guy resizing connecting rod not correcting the bore gauge on the machine.
By the time I caught it, he admitted no one showed him how to do it, so I said we are in the ****, because we are about to get hit with a TON of warranty claims.
In less that 30 days it started, and it was a massive hit to the company.
And of course, I was management at the time, and I had to fire the guy, and then deal with all the claims. The company did its level best to enforce the warranty to the letter. I don’t know how many people got screwed on the deal, but it was a bunch.
It wasn’t long after that they fired me for “insubordination” because I refused to find any loophole I could go screw the customer for something that didn’t cause the failure.
Two years later the company was sold and a year after that it went broke. Just like it should have.
