Link Bar Style Retro Roller Lifters

BBShark

Garage Monkey
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I have seen people question the reliability of the link bar style roller lifters but never have actually heard of any issues. Is this and old wives tale or is there some truth to this?
 
Any roller lifter problems we ever had was with the roller wheel or needle bearing in the wheel, I don't remember ever having an issue with the link, Vertical type or Horizontal type. Most of the problems we had were due to spring pressure going down and then the roller starting to fly over the nose, this on street and race engines, in our case always solid roller.
 
I remember seeing pix on CF some time/years? ago with the link roller pair came apart, and messed up BIG tyme.....I never was impressed with that design....rather remachine the block and go factory style....or just use a later block, I feel there is a good solid reason the GM/Mopar engineers went with the dawg bone keepers, and spider plate hold down....
them companies not spend a damn dime they don't have to, money men see to that....

:lol::harhar:
 
Never have seen any link bar issues to date, But we see alot of lifter that are under size for some reason, That being said we lifters that are a .841 OD and GM lifter bores run .8438 to 8443 which will give you .0028 to .003. which is way to much. And having lifters in there rocking around that will break after a while.

If you don't have bore gauges measrue a flat tpappet lifter to compare the size differance and go rom there.

Wre like to see .0015 to .002 lifter to bore clearance!!
 
Never have seen any link bar issues to date, But we see alot of lifter that are under size for some reason, That being said we lifters that are a .841 OD and GM lifter bores run .8438 to 8443 which will give you .0028 to .003. which is way to much. And having lifters in there rocking around that will break after a while.

If you don't have bore gauges measrue a flat tpappet lifter to compare the size differance and go rom there.

Wre like to see .0015 to .002 lifter to bore clearance!!

That could explain why some of the really high end (read very expensive) builders install bronze lifter bores?
 
Just replced the lifters in mine along with valve springs.

I had 5 bad lifters, rollers had excess play. I run the link bar lifters and seen no issues with the link bar area.

Neal
 
Never have seen any link bar issues to date, But we see alot of lifter that are under size for some reason, That being said we lifters that are a .841 OD and GM lifter bores run .8438 to 8443 which will give you .0028 to .003. which is way to much. And having lifters in there rocking around that will break after a while.

If you don't have bore gauges measrue a flat tpappet lifter to compare the size differance and go rom there.

Wre like to see .0015 to .002 lifter to bore clearance!!

That could explain why some of the really high end (read very expensive) builders install bronze lifter bores?

Some guys do bush them back to standard to correct alignment issues as its more important with a roller lifter then a flat tappet cam and using a roller cam you are dealing with direct center line and if the lifter bores are off it will affect seat timing events.

Most builds now go right to the .903 liftes as they have a bigger body bigger wheel and axel and going to the .903 your correcting the lifter bores as well.

We hardly ever bush lifter bores back to standard as it ocost about 700 dollars to do VS 250.00 to bore them out to .875 or .903
 
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