What causes a Camshaft to Fail?

What are the causes and signs of a camshaft failure? Welcome to Mercie J Auto Care, where compassion and craftsmanship come together. I'm Rick Smith, master certified technician. Well the number one cause of camshaft failures is lack of good lubrication. I don’t encourage everybody to go really long oil change intervals. The more often we change it, the better and we just got to use really good quality synthetic oils on most cars at this point. The other thing is some of the failures are just because of a manufacturing flaw. They didn’t use the proper hardening on the materials or something like that. So what are the signs? A couple things that happen is you’ll hear some ticking. That is if one of these lobes wear. If you want to know what the lobe is, I talked about that in another video I will link below. The other thing is the phaser can start to cause a rattle because the phaser is what actually changes the cam timing and it’ll rattle back and forth. So worn lobes, worn phasers and change your oil frequently and that’s the best way to extend the life of the camshaft. So thanks for watching and until next time, safe travels and blessings to you.