It's all making more sense now. If the car is stored for a winter again up here, I'll do just that, and leave it parked with fresh oil and the valve cover vents plugged.

 

Have you ever seen water dripping out of someone's tail pipe in winter?

With H2O being water, "a hydrocarbon combustion reaction looks like this

HxCyOz + O2 => H2O + CO2

Obviously this is not a balanced equation, and I'm sure you could do a bit of algebra to figure out the balanced equation for any hydrocarbon, but I won't."

And it isn't just plain water... "some of that carbon dioxide will become dissolved in the water to form a dilute carbonic acid".


When I store my S for the winter, I also cover the air intake and the exhaust tips, not so much for water vapor but for the squirrels and mice.

 

You're talking about the picture in post #1?
So the your cams went from normal to this in 3 days?
The oil that's left on the cam towers & bolts looks like milk, maybe you have a huge coolant leak and your oil is more coolant than oil.
I'm not sure coolant can be that corrosive to iron in 3 days, you have rust build up in the mm thickness.

 

Now at 72K miles. That picture was taken <50K miles doing Billman's valve adjust on drive by wire cars (mine is an 09). I might add it was a good thing I did it then, the exhaust valves were indeed tight. I checked again around 65K miles and the picture was the same as this: no change.

I might add I have always used Mobil 1 0W-30 and change it every 3K miles.

 

If you can figure out a balanced equation for pump gas on paper I know people that would bury you in money. Because after 5 years of spectroscopy analysis, quantum mechanical modeling of fuel kinetics, and computer hardware that would make a nerd soak his pants, we're not there yet. We're still figuring out radical propagation stages, and where we are now is eons compared to 2 years ago.

 

There's no way that happened in 3 days, but yes I drove the car 3 days before removing the engine and taking that pic. When I drained the oil, it just looked like oil. It wasn't milky at all. Inspecting the cams better, and the corrosion appears to just be on about half of each cam, so that must have been the top as the car was sitting, and maybe all the oil ran off of the top, leading to condensation to accumulate and collect on the cam lobes. The cam journals are nice and clean, which leads me to believe that oil was still present on those surfaces, preserving them.

I'm taking the cams over to the machine shop on Monday to see if they can clean them up and save them. Otherwise I'll be tossing them in the trash and buying cams.

 

Just a couple quick updates. 1. I stopped by the local machine shop and both guys there shook their heads and just said (like most of you) to scrap these cams. 2. I emptied my catch can and it was full.............. of water. Major fail on my part.

I guess I'll either try to find a pair of good used AP2 cams, or just order some new Brian Crower cams.

 

I have no personal experience with the BC cams but personally, I would not use a set (of ANY aftermarket cams) if they were given to me. I have seen other instances of premature wear and oil contamination with other manufacturers. OEM FTW for me!

 

Beware any aftermarket camshafts. I too will give them away for free. I have aftermarket cams to giveaway with 10k miles. You’ll see why they are free once they arrive.