i chalk it up to a little bit of telephone game with a dash of hysteria and a pinch of hyperbole. the whole: my girlfriends cousins best friends boyfriend flatted out three cams
if it was as bad as everybody is making it out to be we'd be seeing posts weekly on it with pictures of the carnage.
I'll add my own two cents to this.
Normal order of events:
1.) Buy project car, have big wide-eyed dreams of big hairy burnouts and jumping rivers just like the General Lee.
2.) Find a crusty 360 on marketplace and haul it down to the machine shop and tell them to build you the biggest, baddest stroker imaginable. Wait one year, seven months before retrieving a motor that went over budget by about four grand.
3.) Five years later, after finally paying off the home equity loan you took out to pay for the engine, you find out it isn't going to bolt in to your car... waddaya mean the slant six transmission won't fit a 360??
4.) Two more years of chasing parts, and you decide the car looks kinda ratty to put that nice engine into... off to the body shop.
5.) Two years and another home equity loan later, the body is back in your garage. You slide the motor out from the corner and put it in front of the car, and make vroom vroom noises. Over the course of the next year you put the engine in and out of the car 3 times getting everything to fit and finding those last bits you need...
6.) Ten years after the motor was built and every ounce of assembly lube has oozed out, the cam break-in lube has turned to feldspar, and a colony of field mice have set up housekeeping in your intake manifold; you fire it up- hmmm, that doesn't sound good. Uh-oh, the oil pan is full of babbit and metal shavings. Out the engine comes, and tear it down- eeww, the cam is flat and the metal must have taken out the bearings... my cousin said all new lifters are bad so that must have been it.
7.) Get pissed off and sell the whole mess on marketplace for about .05 on the dollar and go online and tell everybody how crappy XYZ's cams are.
Moral of the story: Get the rest of the car in shape and build the engine last, not first.
Rant over.
To the OP's question- most all of the major manufacturers have quality offerings; yes, I keep hearing this and that about Comp Cams, but have not personally run one of theirs in a looong time so I don't know. Isky, Howards, Racer Brown, Lunati and Bullet (among others) all have solid reputations around here, so pick your grind and break it in correctly and you should be fine.
