Toasted Cam Shaft - Cummins ISX 870

Same thing happened to me. Brought mine in to do an overhead and ended up doing the cam. The only thing noticeable with mine was the jake started to lose a little umph at lower RPM's. From what I saw, all of my cam lobes were caveatted, but worse towards the front, resulting in the poor jake on 2 cylinders.

 

Camshafts are sensitive to oil quality - keep it over 20,000 miles and they go at half a million. Drop it at 15,000 you can double that. A guy I know goes for 12,000 oil changes and at 1.1 million miles he did overhaul on ISX and camshafts were good. I know it is very unpopular to change oil these days but its just that simple: save on oil = spend on cams

 

As others have said this is/was a known issue with the ISX. I was advised to get the 1st overhead/tune up done before the prescribed 500K, so that if this was discovered it would be repaired while still under warranty, many others found out the hard and expensive way.

 

If you have money to waiste,feel free.
Throwing good oil away too early will not extend the life off your engine.

 

That's whats going on with todays truck owners - pyrometers are "too expensive" and oil change is "money to waste"

 

Ramblin man,you didn't really read the post.
You formed an opininon before you read it.


Let me put it another way why run 12000 miles with your oil?
If we use your logic if we changed the oil after 6000 miles,the engine would last twice as long?



You seem to forget that times change and so did the oils.
But if you are smarter then countless engineers,........................................

 

There is nothing to even talk about: Save a hundreds on oil = spend thousands on parts and labor. Lots of people doing it, It's OK with me, not my money - but its so dumb its funny

 

where I work they found out the 871 ISX's on 50k synthetic oil changes was eating cams up around 350k, so they went back to dino oil and 36k oil changes. I grew up an oil change is the cheapest engine you wont have to buy, just my .02