I made a lamp out of car parts a few months ago for my daughter Tracey, and once it was finished I had it displayed in our spare bedroom for awhile. The lamp came out nice enough that my wife wanted another one when Tracey took hers home, so this is where my new project comes from.

If you read the other lamp project then you'll know that the camshaft came out of my 33 Ford, which was cool because part of the car stayed in the family. However, this lamp is getting a brand new one....mainly because I couldn't find a used one. This new cam I bought from Summit Racing and it was the cheapest one I could find. That's the good news but the other news is it doesn't go to a Chevy or a Ford, not even a Mopar, it goes to a Holden. What's a Holden? It's an engine made in Australia and it has engine sizes similar to a small block Chevy. At least it's a V8!!

As you can see the cam is made by Comp Cams and it was only 30 bucks. Really!! How they can make something like this so cheap is beyond me. On the other hand, I'm fine with it. And the cam specs have it listed as a fairly large camshaft so it's all good.

One of the first things I noticed once it was out of the box was... it has two gears. I'm sure one of them is for the distributor, however, the other one I'd have to guess.... maybe for the oil pump? I'm mot sure but to me it just adds to the looks so that's good news. The other thing I noticed right away was the different size cam journals (cam bearing surfaces). I'll revisit this in a moment because it's an issue. Anyways, let's get started with the project.
 

The first thing I did was remove the dowel pin that would go to the timing set (arrow). In my case I don't have any use for it so out it goes. This was simple to remove" I grabbed the pin in my bench vise and hit the camshaft with a soft faced dead-blow hammer. After a few smacks, it came right out.
 

As you can see this cam has three different size cam journals. This is a first for me and I'll just have to work with it. Notice the two on the right side are the same size at 1.889". Note: If you're wondering about this dimension being correct compared to the picture, it is, the camera didn't show one of the two 'eights' very well as it looks like a 'three' in the picture. Working our way to the left we have two more that measure in at 1.869" and last but not least we have one at 1.579".

This will be a slight problem for me trying to hold it while drilling because the ends are different sizes. However, I'll just make some tooling to help aid in holding it.
 

Making Tooling

Here is the tooling I was talking about and notice the two different sizes. The smaller diameter is finished and I'm working on the larger one here. The four holes in the middle are for holding it to the mill table. I'll only use two holes at a time depending on which end of the cam I'm drilling. 
 

Let's Drill A Long Hole

Here are the two drills that I'll be using, which are 5/16" in diameter. The short one is jobber length (normal length) and the other is 12" long. This is similar to how I did the other lamp and should work great for this because this camshaft is made out of cast iron. I used a medium length drill on the other project but I don't think I'll need it for this one.

I'll use the shorter drill first, which will help keep the hole straighter and then switch over to the longer one afterwards.
 

Once I had the fixture bolted down, I used an indicator to find center. Then I used a center drill to give me a starting point. Yes there was already a center in the cam but I wanted to make sure I started as close to center as I could. This was easy to drill and it went pretty fast compared to my other cam. Why? Well, my other one was made out of tool steel and gave me all kinds of problems. But this one only took about 30 to 40 minutes to drill from start to finish, which included both ends.