07 Valley cover

Dustin Jackson said:

I would take the advice from the stuck lifter release kit guy with a grain of salt. I can’t grant any credibility to a guy selling a half baked solution to a well documented problem.

This lifter release guy is up there with the Range AFM disabler guy in my books, sure it gets you by but it’s not the proper way to fix the problem.

Full disclosure I did run the Range AFM disabler for a long time, lifters can still fail with AFM being disabled.

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to be fair, gm uses plastic trays to keep lifters from spinning. that's not a 100% fix for this. non afm lifters fail too.

you'd could try these.. but they are meant for racing.




there's a reason why you never had valve train issues in a Gen 1/2. they used steel plates to keep the lifter from spinning.

@crownvic31 I think in your circumstance you’ll be ok but usually when there is a lifter failure, AFM or non-AFM, there is a reason that the lifter had a failure and once the lifter starts bouncing on the cam little pits and dents in the lifter and cam could cause it to be more prone to lifter failure in the future.

What I’m getting at is lifter release tool doesn’t address the cause of the lifter failure. Like @j91z28d1 said one of the causes for lifter failure are the plastic trays getting loose and not holding the lifters in line. But since your situation is unique and you hopefully fall under the “exception” category.

j91z28d1 said:

not that you'd do it.. but I wonder what would happen if you activated afm on a year that had it all installed but disabled from the factory.

that would be super interesting.

I'm pretty sure yours would stick at this point, so not recommend. but be a interesting experiment.

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Maybe when im ready to do the complete delete i can give it a try. But i am not touching that for sure right now.

Dustin Jackson said:

@crownvic31 I think in your circumstance you’ll be ok but usually when there is a lifter failure, AFM or non-AFM, there is a reason that the lifter had a failure and once the lifter starts bouncing on the cam little pits and dents in the lifter and cam could cause it to be more prone to lifter failure in the future.

What I’m getting at is lifter release tool doesn’t address the cause of the lifter failure. Like @j91z28d1 said one of the causes for lifter failure are the plastic trays getting loose and not holding the lifters in line. But since your situation is unique and you hopefully fall under the “exception” category

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My truck was running great. Just had to replace that valley gasket and thought that the flat valley would do. The fact that i only ran the escalade for 3 mins at most after the case, i beleive ill be ok. Saw a video on youtube after i had my issue where someone tried doing the same thing and the guy said BAD IDEA. If i would had found that video before i did what i did, i would had not gotten into this mess.

Found it

So Its been a month since I unstuck my collapsed lifter due to the wrong valley cover install. I am now on my 3rd engine oil change and let me just say this escalade is running extremally smooth and quite. Reason for the 3rd oil change is because I changed the oil right after fixing the lifter issue due to the amount of brake cleaner and WD40 I pure down the oil valley to help and release the lifter. I added 1/4th of a quart of trans fluid to clean even more with that oil change. Ran it for 3.5 weeks and just last week replaced the engine oil and filter once again with Mobil 1 5W40 Full Syn oil and the high performance ACdelco oil filter that are recommended for corvettes part # UPF48R. I did add some trans fluid to engine oil this time but just half of 1/4th.

So far everything is running great.

Good update man