4AGE Big port head failure

[Blaze0010]

Hi all,

I an opinion regarding what happened to my engine.

In november i did the maiden trip after completing my restoration project.
During my way back from an event, with around 700km on the freshly rebuilt engine, thank to a friend we noticed a leak from the exhaust camshaft seal.
So i removed the valve cover and removed the E1 cam caps, just to find out that the cam journal was out of round.
That was causing the cam seal to move a bit during camshaft rotation and losing oil.
The oil pressure gauge never signaled a loss of pression, but of course since it was leaking, all the camshaft journal and cap got ruined and grinded with no oil delivered.

I have now rebuilt the engine again, the block and pistons luckily survived and i purchased another head with cams, that has been check by the machine shop (same as the before for both block and head).

I still not understanding what could have caused the issue, could have been bad luck o something i did bad?

The engine is bone stock, 4AGE 16v bigport, with AFM (and it's stock ECU), EGR system removed, no catalytic converter and no O2 sensor.
I'm running the Motul eighties oil 10w40.
Valve lash all in specs and double checked both on Intake and Exhaust.

As anyone ever seen something similar or find any critical issues in my setup?
I am at the point were i can drive it again, but i would like to do all properly

Some photos of the cam, don't mind indents in the cam, that was me trying desperately to somewhat fix the out of round with and hammer, while stranded on the roadside.

[The Doctor]

The cam seal leaking would tell me that it did get oil delivered?
There's oil spraying around in the head. The seals are there to keep it in the head area before it makes it's way down to the sump
My guess is that it went wrong from the first start after the rebuild and slowly ate away the bearing surface. Maybe some oil galleries are blocked? After that the shrapnel did the rest.

Or did it leak so much you basically ran the sump dry? The oil light won't come on until there's less then 0.2 bars of oil pressure, which is basically dead engine territory anyway.

[oldeskewltoy]

Bent cams are very rare. There are ways of checking - easiest is to bolt the camshaft into a bare head and see if they rotate smoothly. Other is to use "V" block to check for any wobble during rotation.

Most likely bad luck. Did the head and cam run before the rebuild? Or was the head and cams a used part you picked up to build your engine?

[totta Crolla]

It probably 'picked up' at the very first start.
Be sure to lubricate those bearings well when assembling and build up the oil pressure on the starter motor before attempting a first start from a rebuild.