I know a lot of guys are asking how you go from a flat tappet to a roller cam on these 350 ones 302 this is basically any motor it all applies the same but I'm working on 351 Windsor I got my cam installed and if you just take note of this valley here this is definitely a flat tappet block there's nowhere for the for the spider to actually bolt in and I have a roller block right here and you can see the difference right there right there is where this guy bolts into what he does is he holds down there we go and then each of those little spider legs holds down one of these which goes around these rollers you might ask why can I not just slap these stock rollers in place of these flat tappets well if you look the size the length difference is just going to cause you a bunch of troubles and if one of the I have heard of people using these but it's not worth the damage that you're probably gonna do in the end because when it comes up out of the lifter hole it might stick on this edge right here and then you just start breaking things so it's just better to do it the way I'm about to do it so ordered these there through Trick Flow surprise surprise they're actually Howard Cam's conversion lifters so these particular lifters here you don't have to specifically says don't pump them up so what I'm gonna do is just oil bath them at least give them a chance to to get some air out but these they even have a nice recess to hold the oil in there then you just try to it's gonna be messy we only work in the most pristine conditions we know that then you should follow right down there so far so good all right I'm gonna install the rest of these guys so I got all the lifters installed they've all been oil bath get all the air bubbles out of them some guys like to let them sit for like 24 hours I think it's kind of necessary I've I've never had a lift or failure doing it this way but next we're gonna be looking at the push rods so when you do your retrofit it just goes bye-bye engine and maybe you have the right push rod maybe you don't but what you want to do is it's check to make sure that you have the right length push rod and I'll show you how to do that here in a second but you can see these are two drastically different both on a 302 but one is off a hydraulic motor and one's off a flat tappet alright so I threw both push rods in there you can see this one came off a hydraulic roller but in a hydraulic roller motor the rollers sit up higher and these are recessed for flat tappet motors because these are retrofit lifters you see this one came off the flat tappet so I'm going to check and see I'm just going to use it to check the length I'm not gonna use it to run the motor because I don't know about the integrity I don't know anything about this push rod so I'm gonna end up replacing a whole set but that's just some insurance for me so next we're gonna make sure we got the right length push rod here so how you do that I see a sharpie you want to be sure to do it one by one so the Sharpie doesn't dry on you and Sharpie is easily removable with any cleaner or solvent wherever you plan to use so I got my push rod in there lifters are in there I've got my thumb and chain and then all you're gonna do there's a lot easier with two hands but run on the camera so go ahead and mount up your rocker you got to do this for every I'd do it for every cylinder you come right here and turn it over I turn it over about three times three times for the cam that way we can see where where she's riding at long and now we should be on compression and you just loosen up your rocker and this will give you a pretty good idea where it's riding so I can see it's not dead center it's a little far is a little bit forward so in order to get this you gotta get the right but this will get us in the ballpark so as long as we're in the ballpark we know which push rod length checker to order be long my tool here which it will let's see yeah if that's the case now we got to go old-school all right so this is unconventional but it'll get me in the ballpark of where I know I want to be as far as push rod lengths so it's right there a little bit over eight eight sixteen maybe eight and eight so now I know which length said I kind of need or at least I can get a push rod length checker and order the right right one so you might ask why go from a flat tappet to a roller and I got the two different cams here this was the one that came out of the 351 he just went back to flat tappet for his build and then this is the one out of my 302 it's a trick flow Stage one and it's a roller hydraulic roller cam and the major issue I was having and I was I just didn't want to deal with the problems down the down the roads I'm running a heavier spring and I didn't want to end up grinding down these lobes which a flat tappet is known to do especially if you're running too much spring pressure you'll grind down these lobes and what will start out as a pretty decent cam will be a piece of paperweight with the hydraulic though you don't have to worry about grinding can loads down you can also interchange the cams so like a flat tappet each lifter is matched to each of these lobes and they have to stay with those lobes for the life of the lifter and the cam because they're worn together so they're paired on the roller you can swap out the cam and just you can swap around the lifters you can swap all sorts of stuff around without having to worry about you know wear marks or improper wear like you do with the flat tappet and then the only other concern that I didn't cover yet was the gear so you got to know what your cams made out of if it's cast like this is a cast you can see just got the little sand casting marks and this is trick flows this is made out of a completely different material well you have to actually get a distributed gear change out your distributor gear for which cam you have I can't tell you what you need because I don't know what you have but there's plenty of write-up on it on the Internet this is the gear for the 302 and this is the 3/5 one I don't know what he has on there so I'm just gonna go ahead and change it out it's $30 and it's really less of a headache if I do it now then if I chance it put it in grind down a distributor year and then have to cut break down the motor and replace the distributor gear