Is it feasible to metal spray a cam?

Charles Rainey · 06-29-2011, 02:33 PM

Philip/Bill
I cannot tell you if you can metal spray a cam and make it live, but I can tell you what I tried. A few years back I wanted to make my on grind, so I metal sprayed a cast cam just to try. Man I CNC "grinded" this cam and it looked awesome. Put a set of rollers on it and seemed to be ok. Well I lost control of the rpm and every thing in the engine was wearing metal spray. Bearings and pistons looked awesome. i got some picture some place but I hid them so no one would know how dumb I was. I think what happened was that I lost control of the roller lifter and it banged the shaft and just peeled the spray right off or it was the point contact of the roller. Dont know which cause I was afraid to talked to any body about it cause I was so dumb. But what I finally did was get a billet steel blank and had a guy with a lathe to make me a billet with all the knobs on it then I sent and had it ground. Might want to try that if you have some one handy on a lathe. CNC grinders make it pretty easy for people like Lunati or Comp to do that now. Was hard to do when you had to use masters

06-29-2011, 02:33 PM	#6
Charles Rainey Junior Member Join Date: May 2011 Posts: 40 Likes: 0 Liked 0 Times in 0 Posts	Re: Is it feasible to metal spray a cam? Philip/Bill I cannot tell you if you can metal spray a cam and make it live, but I can tell you what I tried. A few years back I wanted to make my on grind, so I metal sprayed a cast cam just to try. Man I CNC "grinded" this cam and it looked awesome. Put a set of rollers on it and seemed to be ok. Well I lost control of the rpm and every thing in the engine was wearing metal spray. Bearings and pistons looked awesome. i got some picture some place but I hid them so no one would know how dumb I was. I think what happened was that I lost control of the roller lifter and it banged the shaft and just peeled the spray right off or it was the point contact of the roller. Dont know which cause I was afraid to talked to any body about it cause I was so dumb. But what I finally did was get a billet steel blank and had a guy with a lathe to make me a billet with all the knobs on it then I sent and had it ground. Might want to try that if you have some one handy on a lathe. CNC grinders make it pretty easy for people like Lunati or Comp to do that now. Was hard to do when you had to use masters