The Chrysler K-Car Club

What is a cam? I hear it cracks. Whats all the publicity I hear about pre 83 K-cars being susceptible to bad cams? How does it affect reliability. Can someone give me an honest answer?

The cam is what you will find if you take off the valve cover. It is turned by the timing belt from the lower crankshaft and basically restricts the valves from flying out! My cam was extremely worn, sounded like a bunch of baseball cards stuck in bicycle spokes, because the cam followers were loose and slapping metal to metal on the badly worn cam lobes. I think the former owner didn't care for it as he should have, or didn't change the oil or add any either. The '82 coupe I recently sold had slightly more miles that my '81, but with no wear on it's cam, but it had one owner who cared for it.

I don't think the early Ks had a bad cam design, just alot of bad owners as the cars got old and people really didn't care for them anymore.

The cams break due to head warpage cause by overheating. Time for another head if the cam breaks. Any aluminum head well warp if it gets hot enough. Thus it's very inportant to maintance the cooling sys. What alot of people don't know is these engines are noisy from the get go and think they have cam, lifter problems. The high perf. cam ( S60 ) slider Mopar used to sell did wear out fast thu. A cam should turn with absolutely NO resistance in the cam bores.

before I rebuilt the engine on my 2.2 turbo the engine it was running bad, when I took it apart I found out that the cam lobes were wore out, some more than the others, so each of the 4 cylinders was doing it's own thing. The moral of the story is watch your cam shaft, it will wear out.