Solid lifters in Stock

[Pat6868]

I ran my 327/275 stocker engine with plugged hydraulics at .005 lash cold. It did not like any tighter.

[SSDiv6]

The ramps on camshafts on hydraulic and solid cams are designed differently for many reasons.

Due to the various ramp and lobe designs in Stock Eliminator such as dwell and non-dwell lobes, when you plan to switch from hydraulic to solid, the best is to talk to the camshaft designer at the camshaft company; not the salesperson.

If you are building a new engine, just have a new camshaft made for use with solid lifters. It will have the proper area under the curve and also, with the right lobe, you can create lofting that will provide the engine with more lift than what the actual cam was physically designed with.

Yes, due to the dynamics of a solid lifter, they tend to make more power and RPM quicker when compared to a normal hydraulic lifter only if the valvetrain geometry has been optimized. When I say normal hydraulic I am not talking about a restricted travel or blocked hydraulic lifter.
Also, a solid lifter will be lighter than a hydraulic counterpart. I always recommend EDM drilled solid lifters that are DLC coated, installed with the proper lifter bore clearance.

Many years ago during a conversation with Don Tweles at General Kinetics, he shared that his dwell lobes could be run 0.006 ~ 0.010 with solid lifters.

[Rob Petrie E395]

Thank You to everybody who replied since I revived this thread. I'm going to give it a try. I've got to do something to find some ET. Hopefully this, a 200 transmission and a couple other things will help get me going In the right direction.