Is there such thing as a good lifter?

Bakerlite said

I read up on them a while ago. As long as they are a bleed down lifter, they will continue to bleed down through the whole lobe cycle, regardless of how you set them with a feeler gauge. Maybe not as much as at low RPM, maybe not as bad as the older design, but they will still do it and I doubt they would reach absolute "zero" bleed down.
It's a function of the lifter, it's built into the design.
It's like bailing water with a bucket that has a hole in it. The faster you bail, the less water you will lose through the hole, but you will still lose water.
Oil temp, viscosity, pressure , aeration and valve spring pressure are all factors that also effect the bleed down rate.
Having said that, it doesn't mean that they wouldn't be of some benefit in some applications and I have read where people have had good results with the newer lifter.

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There was a Johnson lifter white paper I read that stated all lifters bleed down as a design restriction. You can only get the piston to lifter wall clearance so accurate with the price point. I thought I read that a good lifter will bleed down in 4-10 seconds under spring pressure. That is not a defective, it's a fact of manufacturing design as they don't have rubber seals between the piston and the bore like a hydraulic cylinder. This is completely functional as all the lifter needs to maintain piston height is under the duration the lifter is at lift, or tenths (or hundredths at rpm) of a second. All lifters will collapse over time when there is no oil pressure. Oil pressure only snugs the piston up to the pushrod. Then the check valve closes when the pushrod starts to push down on the piston in the lifter, like a hydraulic jack. That makes the lifter a solid (pretty much) piece for the duration of the lifter cycle. All you need to do to get that undamaged crown lifter back into service is to inspect and /or clean the check valve/disk device. There usually are some sparkles at the bottom of the closed end of the lifter due to no provision to drain these during operation. Clean em!