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Manual Camshaft Grinding with Berco Machines

3:14
41:07
196.8K views

At 3:14 in

Comp Cams Factory Tour: How Does a Performance Camshaft Get Made?

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What happens here

The video then introduces older, manual Berco camshaft grinders from the 1950s. These machines use a 'degree head' and 'index plate' to set grinding angles. Master plates, specific to intake and exhaust lobes, are crucial for guiding the follower wheel, which is the same size as the grinding wheel. The operator manually turns dials to control the infeed of the grinding wheel. These machines are slow, producing only 6-8 camshafts per day, and require highly skilled, patient operators to ensure consistent quality.

Goal: Understand the operation and limitations of older manual camshaft grinders.

Tools and materials

  • Berco Camshaft Grinder Berco — Grinding camshafts manually
  • Camshaft — The item being ground
  • Diamond Dresser — Shaping and cleaning the grinding wheel
  • Follower Wheel — Traces the master plate to guide the grinding wheel
  • Grinding Wheel — Removing material from the camshaft lobes
  • Master Plates — Guiding the grinder to create the correct lobe profile
  • Coolant — Cooling the grinding process and clearing debris

What they say

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this is cool what era is this machine from these were made back in the 1950s so this would have been a verto cam grinder it's got a degree head that sets your angles on here so the camshaft fits in between centers depending on sitting on the steady rest here there's an index plate on the back that sets it up for each angle so if you see this pin right here you can grab that pin and change to each angle in the firing order so as they go to each lobe they'll run to the position on this on the end here you've got two you've got a stock for two masters so the master is this place that goes right on here so you have an intake and exhaust master and they go on this and there's a follow wheel that's the same size as the grinding wheel so there's a 17 inch follow wheel riding on here the grinding wheels right here it's dressed with this diamond set up right here this traverses across to touch the wheel and then the operator will go through there put the machine in gear and so this the original cam that lake had in 2002 it was ground on one of these machines since there was nobody using this machine to comp right now here's some footage from the holmen moody shop where larry wallace is grinding a cam that i got a couple weeks ago you can kind of see how the machine works and how he turns that knob to bring the wheel in ever so slowly i mean it's really like this is this is it this is how it works and this is how those cnc machines work on the other side of the shop but you can't see inside there because of all the cool spraying around so now you know what it looks like it's pretty wild looking so to do it it really requires having really good verco master um you know if you don't have a good master if you have a great master this machine can make an awesome handshake the only negative of this machine is you can only make about six to eight good cam shafts a day you know because it's not terribly fast you can see all the coolant is just coming out of this little spigot right here

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