1500 Horsepower?! Maximum Power Engine Mods | Engine Masters | MotorTrend

[Music] we've got special guests here richard holdner who's like the king of the big bang making huge power on stock ls short blocks and that dates back to i think 2011 right yeah it goes all the way back to 2011 that first story for hot rod magazine that little 4-8 that we thought was a 5.3 turned the boost all the way up on the stock short block then it made what made 1208 horsepower which was pretty impressive back then and actually we never broke it it came off the dyno it was still running but ever since then you've been like the king of go to get a junkyard motor put a top end on it and boost it till it blows as soon as we do something cool for hot rod then everybody wants to jump in right so the truck and magazine guys called say can you do the same thing with a five three so we put a five three on turn that thing all the way up 1300 horsepower which is a big number but we saved the best for last okay turned back to hot rod and said hey we want to do it with a six liter so this time we're gonna run six liter same thing stock short block heads cam and intake 1482 horsepower 28 and a half pounds with a six liter not a six two that's a six liter okay and what we're trying to do on this episode is actually beat that record because you're claiming that's the record for the world's most powerful stock short block right well i haven't seen anything either ls or any of the other engine families that have made that kind of power on a stock short block and as you know all of those were gen 3 motors this one is a gen 4 supposed to have stronger rods and a better block so since we always break the rods on these big bang motors hopefully this one doesn't this thing goes a little bit farther each turbo is feeding a single intercooler but it's a dual core dual pass intercooler we've got wastegates for each one of the turbos right now they're running on the springs it's all controlled and all we got to do is adjust our little bleed valve as we do that more boost more fun more power explain though how the organized leak is going to increase boost pressure okay well the way the wastegate works is it's supplied boost pressure that opens the valve up that allows exhaust to escape out and that lowers the boost pressure if we trick some of that flow by putting a metered leak in it now it thinks oh i'm not getting as much boost so therefore i have to stay closed longer so then the boost goes up so as we keep screwing that thing out we get more and more leak more well let's make the screw fall out also we got an intercooler going on here with ice water flowing through it and we're maintaining the ice at every pole we're like dumping a new bag in and you're going to pull some of this water out so that we can chill more ice less water more cool more power should we adjust uh you can adjust all right step two two and a half more turns that's it go i don't know nothing else it's like eleven fifteen so easy i think we'll go twelve hundred fifty yeah exactly [Applause] [Music] i picked up a pound and a half i didn't see the numbers i was pretty caught i was concentrating quite a bit on there i was too i was looking at 100 and a little bit yeah yeah step two 17.6 pounds boost 1213 horsepower 957 pound-feet of torque oh lost the intake ah okay well let's go have a peek at that major failure i think we can fix it all right this is what happens when you really crank the boost up blew the inlet tube off so we took and welded some seams on here so it's gonna hold better so we'll put it back in get back to dynoing nelson we're actually kind of getting cautious we've got one and a half more turns we only need 50 horsepower and you're pulling timing at peak torque in order to try and kill that you know peak cylinder pressure to make the thing live you can't take too much away but it's down there it's down there like 15 16 degrees through big torso yeah and you can't make it 10 right so okay all right all it needs is 50. ah this next episode of engine masters is going to be kind of different because it's very personal to me i needed to build this engine in order to fulfill my need to enter the 200 mile an hour club at el mirage dry lake and so i've got 347 cubic inches of small block and it's gotta make a thousand horsepower so the displacement is not really the only unusual thing about how i've set this up here's an unusual thing i've had a wrench sitting on the intake manifold the whole time perfect the other thing that is kind of weird about this as a race engine is that the plan was not just build absolutely the most power i possibly can instead it's about overbuilding the engine so that it can handle the thousand horsepower i need to make without really shooting higher than that my goal is always over build and then make the thing make less power than it's really capable of so that everything is completely reliable as a result the bottom end is incredibly expensive and incredibly trick and the top end is stuff that is not full race it's more like high-end street level stuff and we'll get to that the bottom end needs to be beefy because while guys are making a thousand horsepower on ls engines with turbos all the time these days i don't trust a junkyard short block at wide open throttle for more than a minute at more than 7000 rpm making a thousand horsepower because if parts fall out they catch on fire and at 250 miles an hour that's a bad program it takes a long time to stop parts can throw out of the block and go through a tire then you're barrel rolling the car and so really it is a safety consideration and it's about reliability at bonneville you have to run five miles to get a record twice you have to do it once in order to qualify and wants to back it up that is a lot of effort on the short block and here's how i made sure that it was gonna live the block itself is an aftermarket unit called a dart little m it's the beefiest small block chevy aftermarket block you can get from dart billet main caps the whole shebang the crank and rods i custom ordered from krauer the thing that makes the crank trick is not just the super high quality but also that it has a big block chevy snout on it which is larger diameter and stronger and cut with two key ways to survive the loads of the supercharger being driven off of it and that means that it also has a special timing chain and a special front cover on it by the way this front cover is from milot on everybody asks me about that all right now for some real power what i've got here is a pro charger f1 a94 and this unit's good for right around 12 or 1300 horsepower we're looking to make around a thousand with the small block chevy and uh it mounts right here the centrifugal supercharger is much like a turbo but instead of using the exhaust to drive it it's driven by the crankshaft now here we've upgraded the drive from a typical serpentine to a cog belt and that eliminates any possibility of slip now the crankshaft at max speed is going to be at 8 000 rpm at this engine you have a drive ratio between the drive gear and the driven gear but also inside the housing here we have a step up ratio this one is 5.4 to 1. in other words for every turn here the impeller is going to be turning 5.4 times faster up to maximum speed as indicated on the data plate here of 74 000 rpm we're going to get this hooked up to an intercooler and then into the air intake into the engine we'll see how much boost it puts out and we'll evaluate the whole system on the dyno [Music] hey brulee what's going on here man is freiburger in his trailer it's his motor we're doing all the heavy lifting here makeup makeup yeah oh man he's got to look his best he's trying to put that red helmet back on that he had when he was 15. oh yeah we have the tune up right on the engine we've made sure everything was mechanically okay but the air is not quite as good it's warmer plus there's more humidity or moisture in the air so we're going to do a pulley change to make the blower spin a little bit faster to compensate and then we should be making the power that we're making with this engine and our original testing the baseline as if by magic the procharger shows up on the engine it's actually a super easy installation three bolts hold this bracket onto the front of the cylinder head and then we just have discharge tubing here going through our massive like i think 2200 horsepower capable air-to-water intercooler and pork chops working on plumbing that [Music] pretty good was it good yeah i saw like uh 10.75 i was kind of pegged left eye on the air fuel meter and right eye on the motor now i know these days you can go get an ls engine and throw a turbo on it and you can make a thousand horsepower and it's no big deal but there's no challenge in that and because i am the flip flops and big blocks kind of guy i decided to do it with a naturally aspirated big block chevy you do not want a 4-500 stroke in this deal so the core of it is a 4.375 stroke crank and the thing is at rpm that doesn't dip down into the oil as as much it doesn't get as much of a windage problem and it's gonna last longer it's also in a tall deck block and the reason for that is basically piston ring stability i'm going to be able to run a 6.7 inch rod in it and still have a piston that has a 1.3 inch compression height and doesn't even have the pin up into the oil ring so ring stability is a big part of the reason why we chose that now let's talk about the specific components involved and i have to thank race winning brands who has helped me out a ton with this because no lie this is some very expensive stuff starting with this dart all aluminum tall deck block now obviously the aluminum feature of it is going to save a ton of weight off the nose but there's a whole lot of other things that are trick about this the bore in this thing is 4 600 and i have chosen the complete dart package well they will prep the entire block for you and ship it ready to assemble so that's a huge help what i'm going to show you now is some of the specialized components that are going to go on the outside of the engine that are a little bit different than your conventional big block chevy i'm gonna kick it off with the oiling system if you saw episode 56 of engine masters you know that we made big horsepower and improved our oil pressure curve with a very trick moroso oil pan and that's why these guys are our new best friends for oiling this pan is actually a little bit different than the one that we used before because it's not two-piece it's a little bit cheaper i thought i would end up using a flat dragster pan but these guys advised that the sumped pan like this actually helps oil control and deceleration and so this is more of a conventional chassis car type pan however there are some differences first of all this windage tray is a little more unique than what you might see in a standard street pan mostly because it's got these dividers in it this divides the pairs of connecting rods on the throws on the crankshaft cylinders one and two three and four five and six seven and eight by separating them like this you get even more oil control on the oil pump moroso makes a bunch of very cool billet pumps this is not like a regular cast housing that you would see on one of our normal performance buildups now to be honest with you i don't fully understand what they've got going on in here i asked them about the oil pumps because they make like six or seven different part numbers on them and they looked at what i was going to do as far as clearances on the mains and rods and bearing diameters and rpm and they picked a specific oil pump for me i guess my best advice would be if you're doing something radical like this calm and get the advice on which pump to use because there's a bunch of them and finally it is all together in one piece and there's some more trickery to show you so the 582 is now loaded with a moroso vacuum pump which you can see here you can buy from rosso all sorts of different versions of this they can advise you on what's best including the drive unit what this does is it works almost like an old-school smog pump there's veins inside it so that when it spins it creates a vacuum and you can see we've got it plumbed to the valve cover here so the whole crank case inside the engine is going to end up pulling about eight inches of vacuum and that tends to help piston ring seal and it also helps with oil control now looking at some of the other accessories here on the top we've got a 1050 cfm holley dominator carburetor this one is an xp model with really cool features including the fact that it's aluminum which has merit it's significantly lighter than the old zinc models now the other thing i want to point out is that this is not some boutique frou-frou custom tuner magic guy carburetor that is holley straight out of the box see the jet extension is so that when you're on the drag strip and you launch and all the fuel goes to the back of the bowl it's still picking up fuel there's two kinds there's a kind that threads into the hole and then the jet threads into that and this kind where the jet just falls out like that this jet is oh that's a 94. interesting i was worried that it was going to be like a 96 or 98. usually when you have a really big jet like let's say a 98 in it you have to make a bigger change because when they approach 100 the changes get less and less sensitive in other words if it's 100 to begin with you might have to change six to make it change but with a 94 in it we can change four and make it [Music] yeah change yeah four digits yeah that was a thousand plus yeah no that was the one whew i saw those numbers just flying up like you

Channel: MotorTrend Channel

Views: 491,123

Keywords: motortrend, motor trend, motor trend channel, motortrend on demand, motortrend full episodes, engine masters, engines, 1500 horsepower, horsepower, 1000 horsepower, engine mods, engine boost, supercharged engines, car mods, small block engine, 582ci, turbo engine

Id: Gco9qS9YB2w

Length: 15min 44sec (944 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 14 2020