Cams for 318's

Valiant696 said
Well, I'm late to this conversation, but have spent the last two days reading through all of it. My question is: what does everyone think of the stock 360 2bbl cam in a 318? I didn't see anyone mention it on here. It has a little more duration and lift than the stock 318 cam. The overlap is a little more too. Looks like the intake closes 6 degrees later than the 318 cam per my 1973 Plymouth and Chrysler service manual. It seems that if it worked that great then Chrysler would have put the same cam in both engines. I have a 1986 318 2bbl in a D150 that has a flat lobe on the cam. It has the 302 heads so it has a little more compression than the earlier models. If I can get a little more performance from that 360 cam I would buy it vs. buying a stock 318 cam. I like the spec's on the Lunati 10200700 and Howards CL711381-10 cams though replacing the valve springs is out of my budget. I'm hoping that someone here has already done this and can tell me if they like it or not. View attachment 1715641889

Just wanted to update anyone who's interested. I went ahead and bought a Melling version of the 360 2bbl. cam and a set of their lifters and installed it. I got it all back together and running. It idles smooth with about 18.5" of vacuum. BTW, I received one defective lifter in the set of 16 from Melling. It measured 0.906" diameter instead of 0.904". I'm glad I bought everything from a local parts store instead of online. I had a replacement waiting for me the next morning. If I would have bought it online I would have been waiting about a week for a replacement. Cranking compression runs anywhere from 145 psi to 155 psi between the cylinders. I checked the compression before I pulled the old cam out and it was about the same except for #8 cylinder which had no exhaust lobe left on it and was at 160 psi. The bad cam lobe made it pop back through the intake anytime you accelerated the engine. It also had the intake pushrod bent at about a 45 degree angle on #8 cylinder. The lobe was OK, the lifter wasn't sticking and the valve wasn't stuck so I'm thinking the backfiring caused that? I've had it running on the new cam for about an hour with no other issues. The #7 cylinder exhaust lobe was worn a little too. The rest looked OK. It sounds great out the exhaust too. One last thing I noticed was there was a lot of slack in the old timing chain, but the plastic gears hadn't broken off yet. I figured it was just stretch in the chain so I replaced it with a good used double roller set off of my 340. This set wasn't loose on my 340 but when I put it on the 318, I still had some slack in the chain. The cam to crank center line on this 318 must be a little short. I haven't seen that before. This engine appears to be all original to the truck and shows no sign of rebuilding. Every part I took off of it had a Chrysler part number on it.