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Unread 10-12-2007, 05:45 PM   #12
Gannet
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For a tame idle, 230 and 240 are both pretty much out of the question. And if tame idle is a consideration, Stephen's cams may not be the right choice. To quote from him:

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These cams will not be your usual grandfather-type baby cams - they are all loud, obstreperous, will shake your Vette and make your neighbours hate you. With the exception of the Bunny Cam, none of them are for the faint of heart.
224 is probably the upper limit for a tame idle. For a stock-like idle, more like 214-216.

To put it in perspective, your car has a 196 now. A C5 Z06 is a 204. A C6ZO6 is a 210. A 230+ is a seriously large cam.

What really counts for idle quality is overlap. The longer the duration and/or the smaller the LSA, the more overlap. If all we cared about was power, most of us would be running 110 or even 108 overlaps. Instead, your typical aftermarket LSx cam is a 114 LSA. Why? To try and keep a halfway-decent idle quality. The cams typically run in LSx engines are quite large compared to what would be run in say, a Gen1 small-block Chevy. That means they end up having a lot of overlap, so they tend to have wide LSAs to try and make up for that.

Your stock cam has -30.5 overlap at .050. That makes for a pretty smooth idle. The 224/228/114, typically considered the upper end of the "nice" LSx street cams, is at -2. Big difference, and the 224/228 *will* have a noticeable lope. A classic "230" cam is the LG G5X2, which is a 232/240. On a 114, this has 8 degrees of overlap, which is a lot for a street cam. The tradional upper limit for a nice driver is 0, and that is still going to be a looooong way from a stock idle.
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