The Ca/Fe ratio, a suitable peculiarity indicator,
was found to be quite low for three out of four Am binaries within
. We revealed sufficient evidence
that this ratio declines (i.e. the Am anomaly
increases) with increasing eccentricity.
Such behaviour of the Am peculiarity acquires a firmer footing when
complemented by the behaviour of lithium abundances, which also exhibit
an analogous increase in their anomalies with eccentricity.
We found HD116657 to be another candidate as a Li deficient star
among long period Am binaries, in addition to 16 Ori.
To summarize, the main results met our expectation that long-period Am
binaries () exhibit relatively
large abundance anomalies when compared with other Am stars.
However, at present, it is beyond our spectroscopic and statistical data
to determine whether a possible marginal 
dependence could be
real, or whether it is due to the more pronounced eccentricity relationship
because of the general predominance of eccentric orbits at larger periods.
Nevertheless, this emphasizes that tidal effects are of crucial
importance and no account on Am binaries is complete in which their
role is reduced to being simply a tool to slow down the rotation below
some cutoff velocity.
An S/N more than 
in the lithium region, a lager
sample of stars treated by the same method and reliable Ca (C, Mg, Sc)
abundance data are required to pursue the problem further.
Acknowledgements
This study made use of the Vienna Atomic Line Database (VALD) services. The authors acknowledge the support of VEGA grants Nos. 1002 and 4175. I.I. and I.B. acknowledge the support of the Ministry of Science and Education grant F-603 and CEEPUS project BG-2. We also wish to thank G.A. Wade and P. Hunt for proofreading the paper, R. Komžık for his care of the computer facilities at our institute, as well as to the referee Dr. C. Van't Veer for extremely helpful and constructive comments.