James Dore's 2276cc 1961 Beetle

A few years ago , we had tried some new cam billets , that had been made from chilled cast iron , and sent to CB for them to grind to their 2289 cam specs . Unfortunately they didn't work out and were too hard , causing chipping away of the camshaft material , and then the rough lobes eating the lifters . James' was one of the engines that had one of these cams fail . It came in for a tune up , as it had been running rough , one of the manifold gaskets had been sucked in , causing an air leak and the engine to run a bit lean on the 3 & 4 side , getting the head hot and some barrel to head blow by was occurring . I took the engine out to sort this out , and after speaking to another club member that had one of these cams fail , I thought I better check James' out . Much to my dismay , his was knackered too . So I stripped the engine down and rebuilt it with new CB 30mm lifters and an Engle FK87 , which is very similar to cam that had failed .