tight cams

[yoshi]

hi i have a cyclinder from a 1100 et  with the cam caps bolted down (torqued) and no rockers in the head ,,so its just the head  and cams should you be able to spin the cams by hand  thanks yoshi

[Gixer1460]

Absolutely! If you can't either the caps are mixed up, they aren't for that head, the cam is bent or the head is warped! Those are in order of likelihood of occurance!

[TonyGee]

13 hours ago, yoshi said:

hi i have a cyclinder from a 1100 et  with the cam caps bolted down (torqued) and no rockers in the head ,,so its just the head  and cams should you be able to spin the cams by hand  thanks yoshi

I assume you oiled the cams first ?  

[TonyGee]

you can slacken one cam cap at a time and see if they free up. 

[imago]

As @Gixer1460said, but to add you can narrow things down a bit by releasing the caps one at a time.

If none make any difference on their own wrong caps for the head.

If one frees up the cam then it could be in the wrong place. Or they're the wrong caps for the head.

If one makes a difference, and the when that one's nipped back up the cap at the opposite end makes a difference then it's the cam or head.

The best/proper way to check it though is with plasti-gauge as that will also highlight caps with too much clearance.

[yoshi]

thanks for the good advice lads ,do me head in  pardon the pun  i have a good head, caps that were supposed to be from that head  but are solid when nipped ,up plus i also have 2 spare sets of caps a 2 other sets of cam to mess with ,

[arnout]

Had the same issue recently with a spare EFE head, and it turned out the cams were bent. On closer inspection I also found several small dings on these (Web) cams (bought on Eblag many years ago), indicating they were handled roughly at some time or got trapped under heavy stuff in storage or something.
So putting your cams on V-blocks to measure runout, would be my suggestion (and Gixer1460's).
I managed to straighten the bent cams in the press, taking small steps and first locating the position of the bend. On youtube some folks suggest beating a bent cam with a lead hammer was the right solution, but that approach felt wrong to me.