Its been 6 months since the engine building marathon from last year ended and I feel I am prepared to get back to it. Im burned out on home renovation.
To start with I have aquired some new buckets from several sources and will be trying them out. For a baseline I will be using a hardchromed new style which has been the go to bucket for several years. I have a local shop that does this process from sniper rifle chambers to hydraulic cyllinders. The second is an aftermarket bucket from a toyota that has been modified to work with our valve retainers. It is not a stamped bucket like the stockers but fully machined out of quality metal and nitrided. The next 2 are shorter and lighter buckets which are DLC coated. One was also nitrided and one was not. I found a set of slightly worn 03 cams which I will try to polish up and use as a test base because they are the crappiest of crap and if they survive Id be impressed by any of these. My only experience with cam wear/failureso far was from a set of unnitrided 03 cams on new style buckets and those you could watch wear away through the windowed cam covers while it ran. This will most likely take months if not years to observe/document so I thought Id get it going .
Testing out new cam buckets.
I did not include the xeledyne buckets in this test as I have heard they hold up well with new style cams but its hard to get people to use due to the absurd cost. My experience has only seen one with issues. The last ones I just bought were over $100 each. All of these options will be far less expensive.