Satisfaction

Solid Roller vs. Hydraulic Roller- Is a solid roller worth the maintenance? Do the Solid rollers perform a lot better? Is the only down side setting the valve lash every once and a while?

mike tkach

todays hyd roller cams can make good power,imo a solid roller is just not needed for 99% of performance boats.

skydog

Love my solid! The upper rpms she is a monster!! :-) With T&D shaft rockers my lash has not moved in 30 hours and from what I hear that is the normal :-) :-)!!

Gh700xx

same here unless youre shooting for insane power I see no need for it either

vintage chromoly

I bought a old supercat engine and it has a 55mm solid roller setup. The cam is useless to me as it's very radical but I'm keeping the mechanical roller setup.

A nice side benefit to the mechanical roller is that if you get one valve with a wacky lash number, you know something is amiss and you better check things out.

skydog

Very true I am 12 PSI boost on a 600" motor spinning some RPM. I was looking for every HP I could get so a solid was a easy choice.

compedgemarine

this is a little like asking if I should buy a Ferrari or a Hyundai. both will get you there but one does it a bit differently than the other. you need to address what you are trying to do before you decide how to do it.

Jonesyfxr

Mechanical roller = maintenance
Hydraulic roller = jump in and go

SFOcean

Yep. Same here and I like knowing if the lash changes slightly either way one can find and fix issue before it is too late.

I should add that what makes the solid work is the T&D shaft rockers set up properly for your heads. Stud girdles just don't work on my engines anyway; not even sbc, ran solid anyway due to 7600 shift point in road racing engine. Had to reset every day if run hard.

Rookie

What maintenance is there with mechanicals? Correct me if I'm wrong, but you should never be gaining lash unless there is a problem. They use the same poly nuts, rocker studs, rocker arms and pushrod guide plates. Everyone says that you need to check them every year. Every time that I checked mine they never moved. I switched from solid cams last year that were lashed at 0.026" hot to hydraulic roller cams that I am running solid lifters on that are lashed to 0.007" and they are silent. If I here any little different noise in my the valve train there usually is something wrong. This can be masked for a while with hydraulic lifters.

I don't run solids on hydraulic cams to be different or for the little extra hp gain, it's because I'm cheap. I had just spent a lot of $$$ on Isky Red Zone solid lifters and I didn't want to buy 2 new sets of HR lifters for more $$$. So I compromised and sent my Isky's out to get rebuilt for $20/lifter.

I don't know the OP's build specs and agree that solids are really not necessary for most, but around 6000RPM's I would still go with solids.