What's funny, the greatest marketing gimmick known is FEAR. Make someone believe there is an issue and well look right here! We have just the product for you... only $6-20 a quart!

A stock flat-tappet engine can survive with no issues with less than 800 ppm zinc. Engine break-in is the primary concern, moreso with high performance, racing engines than soccer mom's grocery getter. But still a concern, run as much zinc as possible on break-in and maybe the 1st 1000 miles, but after that, regular CJ4 is more than plenty.

With valve spring seat pressures greater than 150 pounds and full lift over 350 pounds the concern for more zinc increases. A very small market of the millions and millions of flat tappet engines have spring pressures anywhere near that. Otherwise the highways and city streets would be cluttered with older cars running modern oils. Oh the humanity of lifter failures!

Not too mention your statement highlighted in Red. Seems you need to take your own advice and actually read about diesel engines. Sure the lightduty engines are mostly running rollers, but the big engines brand new and old with some over 1,000,000,000 miles are still flat tappet.

And you'll notice, cam failures are less and less likely these days. Why? Throughout history there has only been a few manufacturers that made lifters. The biggest being Johnson. Johnson abrupty stopped making lifters (they made high quality lifters) so the less than desirable companies picked up the slack. And guess what? Cam and lifter failures left and right and guess what? It just so happened to occur when the EPA mandated SL engine oil.

When guys figured out diesel oil still had a lot of zinc they switched and then guess what? ULSD and CJ4 debuted.

Well, we have to blame something, why not blame the oil. And let's use FEAR to market overpriced boutique oil. Hell, even Valvoline jumped on that bandwagon.

And then, low and behold, Johnson started manufacturing lifters again. Who, I might add, supplies nearly ALL the lifters for COMP, Crower, Lunati, Crane etc. Funny thing as happened. Less and less cam failure. And those that do lately are running old stock lifters.

Just do some of your own advice and research what you are saying. Because dumb statements like that, based on nothing more than hearsay are what is most damaging to the ZINC levels of CJ4 engine oil.

Besides the fact of just falling for the propaganda of fear marketing.

Josh

 

Lol I was trying to make a joke you know saying since I use diesel oil it sounds like a diesel?

 

Billitt ,I do run those spring psi's in my motor, actually most any performance hydro cam does run as high as 350 lbs over the nose with just a single spring with a dampener so IMO it is a concern because most people, when they rebuild will slip in a performance cam. Guess I should have clarified just what motors I was talking about. As with diesel engines, I was talking about big diesels, not pickup truck diesels. There is nothing "dumb" about my post & name calling is not called for. The fact that it is discussed proves people are concerned about zinc and I am as well. I stand by what I said & when I put my or someone elses hard earned money into a motor, I don't want to take any chances with sub par oils. This becomes an even bigger issue when you build motors for someone else, you just don't take chances like that.

 

what years or time frame are you referring to with regard to johnson stopping the production of lifters?

I ask because shortly after the zinc levels in oil dropped a we lost a couple cams/lifters in our fleet of trucks at work.

both were chevies and both were rollers. the mechanic we took them to said he was seeing a slew of trucks with flat cams or bad lifters come in, including many newer vehicles with rollers.

 

Most OTR and off-highway diesels are still flat tappet lifters.

How much zinc was normally in SJ rated oil? More than the current diesel CJ4? Nope. Yet, performance engines ran just fine before all the hoopla of SL and Johnson stopping production.

Josh

 

There is always going to be crappy replacement parts to buy out there. For now it seems to have quieted down but who knows if thats attributed to bad parts being improved or eliminated, or people now adding the right oil for their engine. These over sees companies close up as fast as they spring up. I've used more than a few sets of Johnsons lifters over the years and when I found out they were going under back then I bought as many sets of theirs as I could afford at the time and shelved them for future builds. IMO if I had to choose, I'd say more often than not it's the builders fault, not the oil. Installation error probably leads to the majority of failures, people can be ignorant to basic valve train geometry set up. Personally I have never lost a cam, knock on wood. but I take NO chances. Everything is checked and rechecked. So with that mind set the price of the oil is not going to sway me away from the right stuff, I just get p.o.'d about it. I just took a Cleveland off the stand that goes in a super nice restored '71 Mach 1. This guys bill was a little under 4k so looking at it from the cost, and the value of the car there is no decision to make, it gets the right oil. Engine building is all about creating your luck.