I've been considering different cam and piston combos from summit and Clifford. The summit kit
, SUM- CSUMEPOO8, comes with a high volume oil pump, the Clifford doesn't.
The Clifford page is titled:
- engine blueprints 6=8 Clifford performance

I tried but could not get the page to load here.
At the bottom of theclifford page and in red letters it states
" High volume oil pumps will destroy your engine. It will twist your cam bearing within 1,000 miles."
Can anybody smarter than me deny or verify this or is it not a concern?

 

Been using hi-volume pumps for decades. Still waiting to "twist" my first cam bearing.

But if you have a near stock rebuild with near stock bearing clearances and are not revving the engine to exceptionally high levels it will not be needed. It will just put an additional load on the cam drive. On some engines this can twist the distributor drive but on a 300 this is not the case because the cam drive system is very robust.

 

If anything you might shear off a distributor gear roll pin.

 

Thanks, my application is a daily driver thats driven about 30,000 miles a year. Lots of highway. Pretty much everywhere East of the Mississippi river. I never see anything above 3500 rpms so I figured it may be overkill.

 

probably would be

 

I have been using a HV pump for 5 years.

 

I wonder then what is Clifford's angle for making that statements. My only conclusion I came up with is that it must be a Chevy, Jeep, or Mopar thing and they make one broad statement for the bunch.
Maybe I'll mail them and ask ford Ford to have an asterisk. *except the Ford. They are stout.

 

I can see a potential scenario:

1. A Clifford cam failed the cam journal(s).
2. The customer wanted warranty compensation.
3. The customer was using a hi-volume pump.
4. "Well, there's your reason for the failure."

 

From what I read, it's the stress that the high volume pump puts on the distributor GEAR, since the distributor spinning is what spins the oil pump, and the cam gear is what spins the distributor gear. The extra stress on the gears can cause wear, which wears out the cam gear, requiring replacement of the cam.

Here's an article I found that discusses it:

Are high volume oil pumps OK to run on the street?


That raises the question though. WHY run a high volume pump?

 

Hi volume pumps work best in race engines which generally run looser tolerances. If you double the bearing clearances, say, from 0.0015 to 0.003 the oil flow requirements go up by a factor of about FIVE TIMES.