Camshaft bearings are sized to fit into the cam housing bore in a specific order.

They also must be driven into position perfectly straight, with the oil galley holes lined up. If you’ve done everything right, once the camshaft is in place, it should spin by hand with ease!

In today’s video from our friends at Summit Racing, Brian and Mike demonstrate the proper way to install cam bearings in LS Gen 3, LS Gen 4, or LT Gen 5 engines. They’re using a late-Gen 3 LS engine block that they rescued from the returns bin and turned into a project 408, but the same techniques work on all of these blocks.

The video provides several tips for cleaning, for how to determine bearing order and orientation, and for test-fitting the camshaft.

Brian and Mike also share how to operate the Summit Racing cam bearing installation tool.

Sometimes called a cam bearing driver, cam bearing tool, or knocker, this tool has a bearing die and centering cone sized specifically to fit the cam journals of Gen 3 LS engines. The removable bearing die allows you to install the first three bearings, and then reverse the tool in the block to install the last two. The same tool can be used to drive out old bearings as well.