Anyone try hoades lifters?

I put them in a 351W I had. The hydraulic cam was pretty radical and when I installed air cond. on the car, the engine would stall out at idle if the air was on. The lifters worked as advertised, although it tapped a little louder then I would have liked at lower rpms. It didn't really sound like a car with solid lifters, more like a car with a valve tap. But the car had better low end power, and the air cond. could run at idle. So I would say if your car is over cammed this is a good band aid.

I used a set of them in a 289 I built way back in the late '70's; I had a Sig Erson cam that was WAAAY too big for the application, and I installed them to help improve the low end torque.

Even with those lifters, there was really no low end until it got to around 3500RPM, but they did seem to work.

On mine, it did indeed sound like a solid lifter cam, but maybe they've made improvements to them in the last 30 or so years since I ran them that prevent them from making so much noise.

All those lifters are are "loose" lifters. In other words, the tolerences inside the plunger area were machined too loose so they require more oil pressure and volume to keep them pumped up than a normal lifter does with the correct tolerances.

Pretty much any "real" cam tech guy will tell you they used to be nothing more than "Johnson" or "Camshaft Machine" seconds that were too loose for their tolerances, so a guy came up with the idea and a selling campaign for them as "bleed down" lifters.

No "real" engine builder EVER uses those. If your cam is too big, then it's too big. No lifter is going to fix that problem. Put the right cam in it and call it a day Too big of a cam WILL turn your engine into a turd. It's that simple.

Just an FYI, there were only TWO lifter manufactuers for decades. EVERYONE from Crane to Comp to Crower to Sealed Power bought their lifters from those two manufacturers. About 5 years ago one of the companies shut down. It was a privately owned business. The owners died and the heirs didn't want anything to do with it so they simply shut it down. Eaton took-on the load for a while. There was a point in time where you couldn't get a lifter from ANYIONE. I had about 10 race engines in here that I couldn't finish because no one had any lifters (roller or flat tappet). I even came-up with ways of getting lifters by putting "-12" behind part numbers to get sets packaged for 6 cylinder engines, and then I went around and got a few singles from various warehouses, but it didn't take long to deplete that stock either and for about 6 months NO ONE could get lifters. That's when the news really came out that no one made their own lifters.

Crane now has a machine that does the insides of their lifters. Some companies had resourses that would make the outside and then they would have Johnson machine the inside and assemble the plungers, but they got so overloaded, they couldn't keep up. Eaton took-on the load and the first few batches looked terrible because they increased the feed speeds of the machines to whip more out faster. For a while there, engines builders like us had issues with the first batches of lifters being loose and ticky during start-up or at an idle.

Wasn't it Crane that came out with their own version, using a machined groove rather than "sloppy fit plungers" they claimed Rhoads used? Still, seems like a poor band-aid for a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. Whether it works or not the noise would drive me crazy. I don't understand how people say they like the solid-lifter sound it makes. Noise is noise; to the other 99% of people around them it sounds like the engine is running like crap, which I guess is true depending on how you look at it.

I thought these things had disappeared in the late 80s. I've yet to hear from any engine builder including these in their engines.

Arron Johnson said:

". . . so a guy came up with the idea and a selling campaign for them as "bleed down" lifters."

Click to expand...

Maybe you should give Jack Rhodes a call, and tell him his father didn't invent the "Vari-Duration Lifter"

Here's the website:

Rhoads Lifters

I don't dispute what you've said about choosing the right camshaft, and not using a "crutch" like a variable duration lifter to "fix" it, but there are some cases where it's a viable alternative--*IF* one can live with the sound, and yes, they do work.

I remember talking to Smokey Yunick about them way back then . . . he was working on a GM contract for their Buick V6's before they put them into production in the early '80's, and he tested a few sets of Rhodes Lifters out on some of those engines. He told me that the camshaft timing was so short on those engines that they didn't benefit from the lifters, so they were never pursued as a production car option (not that they likely would have been, due to their noise).

yah maybe I'll do that being that NO ONE other than the 2 lifter manufacturers MADE lifters for decades. His father might have found a use for loose lifters and Crane might have expanded on it, as many companies have expended on things that work and don;t work, year after year. Shoebeck made some advancements with lifters too, but it ws mainly a coating, not to mention the fact that they were SO darn expensive, they never really caught on.

Name a pro engine builder that uses Rhoades type lifters... that answer would be zero, or close to it. There's a reason for that.

i agree with arron about rhoads lifters being a band aid. i thought about using them once, then i got well. they do work as advertised though, but in the end the better way to go is get the right cam for you combination, you will be much happier in the end.