I have a surpass II that I put back into service after a 10+ year respite. Prior to the respite it ran fine, idles great. Three years ago I started to run it again and the main bearing went bad by the end of the summer. It ran fine on the new bearing for all of last year, but on the first flight of this year it had the bad bearing sound again. The front bearing was still good, but that back bearing had a definite ketch each time around. I replaced it but the bearing noise did not go away. During all this the pump quite and I replaced it with a Perry vp-20 which worked great, then the diaphragm in the carb.. so when I switched to the std goose neck and std carb. I lost a tone of power.

I readjusted the valve lash and flew twice this weekend and a lot of the power was back but the bearing noise was worse too. When I set the rocker arm gap I set it to less than 1 mil.. I normally push it till I’m getting feed back from the springs then back it off till it can feel the slop in the rocker arm as I force it back and forth on the valve and back to the pushrod. The case being aluminum should allow for plenty of favorable CTE mismatch. So that being the case when I did the check of the gaps before readjusting I had 10mils on the intake and just under 6 on the exhaust. This did not strike me at first because the engine had been torn down twice in recent history. But the more I thought about it, I was initially of the opinion I had a bent rod. The more I began to think what ever has changed had to be in the cam train because the gap should not have changed that much without the adjustment device loosening up completely, and I still have that bearing sound. So tonight I plan to remove the cam bearings (I’ve done 5x 4 cycle bearing changes without ever doing a cam bearing shange). Any words of wisdom on how to remove them? should I heat the case? Does it sound like I’m on the right path?

I have not tached the engine lately but would say the rpms are over 3k at idle. Idle is very rough, bouncing the engine all over, and it is hard mounted.

Any thoughts

Joe