I have a straight LS setup.

crower turbo cams along with crower valvetrain. Supertech valves.

Built turbo setup, blah blah.

Anywho, I have a very weird encounter last weekend. I was running the car hard, heard a "thunk" and then the car started sounding like a suburu. with the kinda off cylinder fire they do.

Long story short. Compression tested, it came out fine. 150 across on a 9.0:1 engine. nothing looked out of the ordinary. Pulled the valve cover and noticed on cylinder #3, the rocker had FALLEN out and was just lying there. Checked valve lash earlier that week and they were 3 intakes 5 exhaust. So I found it confusing that it just fell out. When it fell out, it looks like it wedged itself under the cam and the head stud, so it snapped cam caps 5-2.

I tried searching LS rockers, b18b rockers to see if anyone has had similiar problems maybe and what they did to fix it. I know the vtec rockers are shaft mounted, so they can't really just POP out.

Thanks for any links or information you can shed.

 

.003 intake and .005 exhaust is pretty tight for those cams......they are within factory specs but to tight according to crower....but i cant believe that would cause the lifter to pop out.

i had them pop out of their position when trying to tighten the adjuster nut when doing a valve adjustment but i don't think i ever heard of them poping out while the engine is running.

how high were you reeving it to when this happened? is the cam broken?

 

Shifted to 3rd, and the noise happened half way through. I'd say about 6500-7500 rpms.

Nothing wrong with the cam. I'm not 100% sure the rocker wedged itself and broke the caps or not, but that's just a prediction.

Cam wasn't bent, none of the cam cap journals had any damage.

I DID notice that the 17mm rocker shaft pivot holder piece was loose though. (not 100% sure if the rocker falling off caused it to loosen up or if it loosened and caused the rocker to fall out) So maybe the excessive clearance from it loosening up caused it to happen. Engine has over 6k miles on it so far, and this is the first weird thing to happen.

Not sure. so I figured I'd ask. I THOUGHT some people had problems with it in the past. Wasn't sure if there was a fix for it or not.