That would be an awful lot of lift to destroy the seals. Too much, in fact.
Not really. Several things have to be considered. The style seal with the spring like he has shown actually sits higher on the top of the guide than a plain OEM style umbrella seal does. Second, if the builder used a SBC valve instead of the application specific 6 cylinder valve, he lost additional clearance between the retainer and guide because the SBC valve is shorter than the 6 cylinder valve. So even with a stock cam, either of these two scenarios can/will cause interference between the retainer and guide. The spring is too far away from the seal to be the problem, he should look at the retainer and guide as being the problem. He didn't really give us any details about the valves or sizes, so we need to systematically eliminate these as possible causes before we move to something else as the cause. I've seen this happen many times, so I would start there.
