Before we get into the whole Performance camshaft story, it is important to understand how your camshaft works and its purpose.
What is the camshaft? What does it do? And, how can it be modified? It is really simple when thinking about it logically!
The camshaft is located at the top of the engine and looks like a metal bar with egg shaped lobes on it.  The shape and size of the lobe determines the amount of time that the head valves are open and how much they are open. The lobes push close the valves in the head and allow the engine’s cylinders to suck in air/fuel through the intake manifold and expel exhaust gases.

Ultimately you want the intake valve opened as long as possible and want to delay the exhaust valve opening until the piston has started to enter the blow phase. Timing is critical. If the intake is not open for long enough or the exhaust valves open early, much of the power from the engine will be gone.

An average family car will typically have a cam duration of 250 degrees or lower. As a general rule of thumb up to 265 degrees gives a good balance of extra power and maintains smooth running and is most suited to a standard engine. In other words, it won’t sound like a Harley Davidson at idle.

So now that we have the basics out of the way, lets have a look at Performance Camshafts.

A performance camshaft can make or break your performance increase for your engine. Picking the wrong cam will do more performance harm than good. Sure, racing cams sound cool when chatting to your friends about having one, but in the wrong car, you will likely suffer performance loss and drive-ability issues that will make your car sluggish on the streets!

In order to buy the right camshaft for your car’s engine you need to know and write down a few specs. Write down your car’s engine size, compression ratio and axle ratio. Next, you need to think what your car is going to be used for. Will you just be using her as a street car? Will she be used for towing caravans and trailers and so on? Or will she be used as a full blown race car? You need to really think about this seriously.
Don’t say your planning to use the car as a race car when you drive it to work everyday. If you are building the car, plan out all these specs and how the car will be used ahead of time so you will know what camshaft to select when it comes time to splash out your money for the performance camshaft.

Performance camshafts can come in almost any degree you require. But here are a few common cam degrees that you will hear in any day to day conversation; 270,272 and 276 are considered “Street cams”,
288 and 298 degree cams are considered to be “Racing cams” and are used on cars that need to rev a lot higher than your average street car.

Performance camshaft manufacturers like STK enterprises can offer you great advice when you are ready to buy a cam. We would advise to speak to a trusted cam manufacturer about the performance you require from a cam. Remember all modifications go hand in hand. You can’t expect peak performance from your new camshaft if you still have a standard exhaust system or you haven’t had your head ported or
polished.

So now that you have spoken to the professionals about which cam best suits your car’s setup, it’s time to go and buy your performance camshaft! We suggest that you opt for a billet cam, I’ll quickly explain to you what a billet is. A billet is a very durable piece of metal that they grind down to make camshafts out of!
We suggest that you invest in buying a camshaft made out of billet steel, they do tend to cost a bit more than other machined cams, but they are definitely well worth the extra money! Also, it would be advisable to invest in an adjustable camshaft gear, this will benefit you at a later stage when you start to tune your car more often! What an adjustable cam gear does is, it lets the tuner/garage fine tune your engine to get the optimum performance out of your cylinder head.