(Catching up...) OST-079: When Cat Cams went dark

[oldeskewltoy]

"Catching up" posts will be a single post from beginning to end


Inspection after arrival.... ITB smallport build





It received its OST serial #....




and it got cleaned and tumbled... do you see it??




... the massive chunk about to give way





So why, "When Cat Cams went dark"?

This build began in June 2021... the height of the pandemic... with significant supply chain issues.... and of course now is the time the Cat Cams gear cutter (the machine that cuts the distributor drive gear into the exhaust cam) fails... with no spare parts.

Let me back up a bit. OST-078's, and OST-079's cams were to be ordered at the same time, one set was a pair of their 244 cams - OST-078, while OST-079 was to use a pair of Cat's 260/9.0mm cams.... BUT Cat only had one set of blanks with the exhaust cams drive gear cut......

Let me back up a bit further.... About 8 years back I purchased a set of Toda cams....








Are you getting where this is going???

OST-078 did indeed get its Cat cams - you can see the box in this post - http://www.aeu86.org/forum/Thread-OST-07...#pid176705

but, I was out of options with OST-079, so a substitution took place - my set of Toda cams were "sold" to the client.


So back to the head.... and an interesting compound(multi-panel) photo. The center panel shows the 4 intake bowls, while the top/bottom show the matching bowls from each



Btw... this is superb bowl-seat alignment for a smallport head.


Lest us not forget the ITB adapter.... This one is the SQ adapter and I consider this one to be the "middle of the road" of the 3 adapters I know of (1st - Tec-Arts, 2nd - SQ, and last - T3)

2 down....




4 down....






Finally OST-079 was fitted with a set of 1SZ shimless buckets. On the note paper you can see the 2nd 5 digits of the different buckeet part numbers, and how all 8 of the intake shims hit their mark of .008" clearance.