I don't know why but I have been holding off on tuning my car until "as soon as I get X installed". I have realistically run out of "X" as of today with the installation of my WMW mild street camshaft. I was tormented which camshaft to buy, mostly between one of the Catcam choices, Shrick or RMW Dominator but descriptions and information on most every W11 camshaft seems lacking. I'm pretty sure, at least ECS Tuning lists duration and valve lift but I guess I don't know how to pick a camshaft. All I know is I wanted more power, remain emissions complaint and not melt my catalyst. When I saw "mild street" in the description and a dyno sheet from a shop that installed that camshaft, I decided that is good enough for my needs on a daily driver that hits the track a few times per year. I bought the camshaft and then decided I would like a new set of rockers to wear together with my new camshaft.

I had in my garage for a couple years a wideband AFR gauge that I wanted to install, so to stop my procrastination in installing it, I denied myself the installation of the new cam until the AFR gauge was installed. My logic was that the AFR gauge would allow me to make sure I'm not going melt my engine with lean combustion with all these mods on a stock tune. I saw that the stock tune seems to handle it just fine in terms of at WOT I would see 11.3 - 12.3 (safely rich?) on my gauge. I got the AFR gauge installed a couple of months ago and with a lot going on, it was hard to pin down a Saturday to get the cam in and then I decided I could squeeze in the install on Saturday of Memorial Day weekend.

As I installed this engine 4 years and a little over 20k miles ago, I was curious how it would look under the valve cover. My original engine looked amazingly clean inside when I pulled its valve cover around 150k miles but one of the intake valve lobes was worn pretty badly. The engine in my car now has about 95k miles on it and was also very clean inside and I was happy to see no unusual camshaft wear like my original engine had.

This camshaft has a lot more duration than stock and it seems it closes the intake valves more slowly. The best I could get trying to measure lift for comparison vs stock was a little under a millimeter on both (intake and exhaust) lobes. Mod Mini on YouTube installed this cam and measured it. He said it's about 1mm more lift so, we'll go with that.

This is a good view showing the difference in duration. The lobe is more "D" shaped than the stock lobe on the left.





The W11 is a pretty simple engine being SOHC, no VVT or DI, so the camshaft was out in about 90 minutes. I have read comments and saw a video about denting the spark plug tubes for clearance from cam lobes on performance camshafts, so I laid the cam in the head and rotated it by hand. The exhaust lobes come very close to the spark plug tubes. I have no idea how much expansion from heat on a hot engine would close that gap, so I measured it with feeler gauges. I found that a feeler gauge of 0.25mm would prevent the cam from rotating and 0.20mm let the lobe pass easily, so actual clearance must have been around 0.23mm or so. With no idea what safe clearances are, I decided to carefully dent the tubes and give the lobe more room, while at the same time, not denting the tube to the point that a spark plug socket will no longer go in the hole.

After marking the spark plug tube where the lobe is closest to it, I tried about 3-4 taps with a ball peen hammer and measured. That got me to 0.30mm. I stuck my spark plug socket in the hole to verify there were no issues with that an then I tapped more and got each tube to 0.40mm clearance. If I were smart, I would have measured the clearance the stock camshaft runs with but I decided a 0.40mm gap was sufficient. At 0.40mm, the lobe would gently brush against my feeler gauge as it passed. It was a little more loose than I use when checking and setting valve clearances.

Here are my feeler gauges checking clearance.


This is 0.40mm clearance:


Satisfied with the cam lobe clearance, I remembered I had to swap my new rocker arms onto the rocker shafts. I hadn't done that before, but it wasn't too hard to figure out how it goes. Here is the stock cam with the rockers laid out:


Since the intake side has more parts, I swapped the rockers on that shaft first, using assembly lube to pre-lube everything. With all the rockers on the shaft, I flipped it over to lube the lash adjusters and got an unexpected and unhappy surprise:


One of my brand new, genuine MINI rockers was missing the cap that contacts the top of the valve! As each rocker was in its own bag, I checked all the bags for the bright yellow piece but all bags were empty. I check the floor around me. Nothing. So really? My brand new rocker was bagged without the cap? I thought I heard they were removable, so I thought I could transfer one from one of the old rockers to my new rocker. I got it off pretty easily but could not get it to fit the new rocker. As I need to drive the car today, the option of pushing the car outside and dealing with FCP Euro was not an option I was going to choose. I simply took a rocker that was already on the engine and used it. My OCD didn't like that much but pushing the car outside and waiting to complete this job some other time was not going to work for me today.

I got the exhaust rockers swapped and now my engine can truly begin going back together. Setting the intake rocker shaft on the head is something of a pain. Patience and a gentle touch finally got all the rockers where they belong. Exhaust side was much easier. Time to carefully tighten the rocker shaft bolts.


It's pretty easy to see here which rocker has about 95k miles on it.

Getting the cam gear back on took patience and carefully rotating the crank to give me slack to get the gear lined up with the dowel on the end of the camshaft. Getting the chain tensioner back in was easy but getting a tool on the 19mm cap for it was really frustrating. Apparently, you can leave the tensioner compressed and it will pop as soon as you crank the engine. I would rather pop it before I crank the engine, so I was looking for how to do that. Luckily, I decided that because the chain was not on the chain guide properly. It was off track from my getting the chain onto the cam gear, so again I had to carefully rotate the crank to get slack on that run of the chain so that I could get the chain on the chain guide properly. I imagine if I had cranked the engine with the chain off the guide the way it was, it might had jumped time. So with the chain where it belongs, I slowing rotated the engine clockwise and I think I heard the tensioner pop. Good enough for me. I installed a new valve cover gasket and proceeded to finish the job.

The engine started right up and sounded not much different through my Milltek header and exhaust than before. I took it easy on the drive home but I did indulge in 2 pulls to see if I could feel anything. On a flat street, pulling through second gear, my car certainly felt stronger. My AFR was reading a little more lean at WOT than the stock cam (about 12.3). Between that and idling at stop lights with A/C running, I need a tune soon.

On the stock cam, while idling at stop lights, occasionally I would see my gauge go lean and the idle go rough. A blip of the throttle would settle that. Now, it does that at most stop lights and after I blip the throttle, it goes back to the rough idle. Off idle, the car is just fine. I've only got less than 30 miles, so I will reserve final thoughts on this job until my car is tuned and more miles on it. I'll report back then.