Im a beginner on lathes, but from I know, modifying the camshaft to change the lobes into circles with high precision concentricity and diameter, and a good finish, is well within the region of basic lathe work.
I chucked a scrap cam I had up in my ancient Atlas 10F lathe from 1944, and hey it fits! I tried making cuts and the hardened surface cuts reasonably as a first stab. But I can tell I need a follower rest and probably a steady rest to do this task properly. I dont have either of those, but now I have an excuse to buy them lol! In fact now I have an excuse to buy several other lathe goodies too like a quick change tool post and whatever else I would "need" for this..hey maybe a tool post grinder lol
I figure it would be a fun project to modify one of the camshaft lobes properly on the lathe, then mill out an "adjustable" lobe and see how it all works out and fits in an actual head. Its a good lathe project and I've been looking for one.
Since I basically hijacked this thread now, to bring it back to relevance, if there was this "adjustable cam", what would the durations and likely LSA adjustment range need to be? Where in "cam space" would experimenting on the fly at the racetrack/dyno yield interesting results?
As far as software, I'm sure there are simulation packages out there for camshaft design..problem is I bet they require a pretty bad a%% understanding and a ton of work to set them up and interpret the results. I would say we as TD/TM'rs are probably best suited to empirical testing lol