Beehive Springs on Vortecs! Easy .550+ Lift with No Machine Work! (L31 Build Part 6)

what is going on guys pound the shop and tonight we're talking 500 plus lift no Machining on your Vortec head with these beehive Springs let's check it out [Music] so this is going to be our next installment of our l31 budget build where we're trying to get as much power out of an engine with spending uh lease as possible while still building a decent engine um I did a video quite a while ago a couple years ago on installing LS Springs on a Vortec head so this video is going to be similar to that but I think I'm going to get into a little bit more detail and hopefully not drag on too much um I do have a couple options here for Springs all budget options I'll give you I'll provide you with part numbers from Summit uh for you guys that are doing this stuff at home and trying to save some money especially nowadays a little bit of money saved goes a long way so let's get into this and I'll show you what we're dealing with all right as you can see here we have two different valve spring boxes both from Summit Racing uh and they're both a beehive style spring summer racing sells these I believe their pack Springs really high quality Springs really good bang for your buck um the 17400 twos are the ones we're going to be using is the ones with the white stripe here these are good for 550 lift installed at 1.8 inches and I'll explain that in a little more detail in a minute these other Springs here are one seven four zero zero four um they're good for 600 lift and these have 130 pounds on the seat these are I think about 96 I was coming out installed at 1.8 inches so these are more heavier Duty uh valve spring that is good for 50 000 more lift these are going to be used on another project but if you wanted to use these on your Vortex heads you could go ahead and do that I will be using these on Vortec heads on another engine I'm going to tell you guys about soon that has a more aggressive camp for what we're doing uh we're going to be running these bad girls right now but these actually all work out really nice for lt4 hot cam they're a little bit more uh the spring rate's a little higher which is good compared to an lt4 spring and the seat pressure is very similar and the nice part is actually with when you're using a 78 a 787 style retainer like this which is an LS style retainer uh they're quite light oftentimes these retainers are even lighter than a say a dual spring titanium retainer and they're about four or five grams lighter than uh even a stock Vortex retainer so your savings in valve trim weight and we're also going to a beehive spring so valve float issue will not be our valve float will not be an issue with our lt4 hot cam running those spring the retainers we're going to be using which are similar to the 787 from Comp Cams are though 174003s these uh are a nice retainer they're high quality just like all the other Summit brand stuff for the most part and they're going to work really well and I'll show you when we set up these heads in a second what kind of clearance we'll end up with the price point is really good for this for these and right when I went to film this video and check on Parts these just went out of stock so hopefully they come back in stock soon if you guys are looking at buying those but if you're using the 787 retainers make sure you do all the same checks or an equivalent of another brand make sure you do all the same checks and not just take what I'm saying for these retainers uh you know and apply it to your head make sure you do all your checks and verify your own clearances this video is just for reference to get you close so that's what we're using those retainers we're going to be using the felpro seals I'll show you in a minute I used these before I recommend them uh ss72861s from felpro those are a direct replacement for an unmodified Vortec guide and the nice part about these seals is you add a little bit more seal the retainer clearance I find over a stock seal as long as you make sure these are fully seated all right taking a look at the cylinder head here couple things to note make sure when you install your valve seals use a proper installer this is a homemade one done on a lathe but you can buy a installer similar to this make sure your seals are installed all the way down there should be a little Gap here but you'll feel the seal as you tap it down when it's fully seated next thing is make sure this boss is cleaned up because you'll find with these like LS6 style Springs the the lighter ones like the 550 lift ones that the the bottom diameter is going to be uh can be a snug fit on here but it really shouldn't be it should be I'll show you it should fit like this should just push right down with minimal effort okay you shouldn't have to force the spring down or wiggle it on it should just push down you do find they are a little snug make sure you take um a sandpaper roll like this on a die grinder and then just just go ahead and just clean them up clean up the some of the casting irregularities and that the spring should fit on there no problem sometimes you'll find with the Beehive Springs they're not perfectly round and that's why you get a little bit of a snug fit but usually what happens is this is just dirty or or there's a little bit of casting imperfections that need to be cleaned up and the spring should fit on there no problem first we're going to install one of these retainers with stock Keepers and I'm going to walk you through that so let's pretend we're going to use these with stock Keepers so first off what's what you're going to find if you you can use if you go to my LS6 video I showed you a coat hanger trick or you can use a spring mic and measure the distance this is your install tight from the base of the head to the bottom of the retainer that's how much the spring sees when it's installed so the spec for those Springs is 1.8 inches but if you use your stock Keepers you're going to find this distance right from here to here is going to be about 1.750 maybe a little bit more if the valves have been down there the seats have been done so it's going to be between 1.750 and 1.760 so that distance right there the next thing you're going to notice so our installed height 1.7508 approximately this distance from the seal to the retainer which is an issue with vortec heads you never want the retainer to hit the seal but you're going to notice that distance right there is going to be approximately 570 thou all right so with clearance uh because you got to remember you have to have a little bit of a buffer and that buffer is about 50 thou uh you should you'll have technically enough room to run 520 lift with the stock Keepers but let's think about that for a second if we have a spring this is again this is a scenario if we're using the stock Keepers if we have a spring that's designed to be installed at 1.8 inches which these beehives are but we install it at 1.750 so that's a smaller distance so that means the spring is more compressed when it's installed what you got to realize is taking 50 thou off the installed height that takes 50 thou off our um available height of the spring so if the spring is rated at being able to accept up to 550 lift at 1.8 inches when we install it at 1.750 this spring is only good for 500 left so whatever you take off the installed height if it becomes smaller uh two things happen the the sea pressure goes up and your ins your available lift goes down so um this this spring installed at uh 1.750 will probably be maybe 105 installed height we're installed or install the pounds we're installed at 1.8 it'll probably be about 95. um under 500 lift and you want to run beehive Springs you can use the stock keepers so now if we want to increase our installed height we have really one option that is bring the retainer up we can't we can't go machine the pockets because that does nothing for our guides and we're trying to go for a no Machining uh way around this so what we could use is what is called an offset keeper so the groove that actually locks onto the valve stem where a retainer sits is actually shifted down this is a 50 thou offset keeper or uh sometimes called a plus 50 offset and you can see the groove on this one is in the Middle where this one is shifted down and when we use these 50 thou offset keepers that will move our retainer up so not only do we increase installed height with that but we also move the retainer up so our retainer to seal clearance is also increased by 50. with our stock Keepers we had an install height at 1.750 so you're good for 500 lift with our 50 thou offset Keepers we had an install height of 1.80 so we were good for 550 lift but let me show you a downside of running an offset keeper why you shouldn't just jump on that let me show you when you move the retainer up you have less valve tip okay and why you need to know why that's important is because vortec heads use a self-centering rocker arm so they don't have guide plates here the rocker arm needs has these little knobs that will actually Center itself on the valve tip if there's not enough nub there the The Rock arm just slides off the valve tip so that's why you have to run a a self-centering rocker arm like the stock ones right here as you can see how they have those raised edges same thing the rocker arm centers on the valve tip on the exhaust valve this is no issue because there's a little bit of added valve tip on on the rocker or on the on the exhaust valve but let me show you the intake valve as you can see when we moved the retainer and offset Keepers to the intake valve we have even less of a valve stem or a valve tip sorry and barely enough for self-centering rocker it's actually right on the limit you'll find a lot of these self-centering rocker arms the depth of those Nubs is about 65 thou I have a few different options here there's a this is like a testing arm I use but it's a it's um a roller a full roller rocker self-centering and it's about the same it's about 70 65 70 thou in depth so you want to make sure you have more than that in uh in a valve stem uh tip because you want the the tip of the rocker only to be riding on the valve stem it can't be touching the keepers it can't be touching the retainer the the has to ride only on the tip of the valve now you're probably wondering if uh a stock keeper only gives us 5000 lift availability if uh offset Keepers gives us the lift but then we have issues with the rock arm what are the options here this is where a thirty thou positive offset keeper comes into play okay let's go over the pros and cons of of what we got going on here and remember this is with this particular Summit Racing retainer with our Summit Racing valve springs using our felpro valve seals if you're using any other different combination you could have different results so with our stock keepers and this retainer we have an installed height of 1.750 with a seal to retainer clearance of 70 thou which is good we need at least 50 so we're good there so with that we can run 500 lift the downside being we can only run 500 left on our spring that could potentially run up to 550. so when we jump up to the 50th offset Keepers and we want to run an install height of 1.80 which is what this spring is uh calls for in the spring to get the 550 lift we we can get the 550 lift with still having 70 thou sealed retainer clearance because we moved it up the downside being we lose the valve tip so it makes it hard to run certain um self-aligning rock arms the middle ground for all this is a 30 thou offset keeper which give us an installed height of 1.780 that means this spring is slightly compressed from the 1.8 installed height this gives us availability of 530 thou lift on this spring with still maintaining that 70 thou seal to retainer clearance now if you're going to ask say we're going to go to the 600 heavier duty springs the 600 lift this brings the 17400 force from Summit Racing if we go to that spring we we can't get the 600 lift out because we're limited to our retainer to seal clearance but we can bring that up uh our closer 20 thou from what we had before 70 thou clearance so that brings everything up 20 thou so if we switch Springs where we maxed out our Old Spring we can go to this spring and now uh at one install that 1.8 we're good for 570 thou lift what 780 with a 30 thousand Keepers we're good for 550 and with our stock Keepers we're good for 520 with that spring but remember as you uh bring down the installed height your spring pressure will go up it's amazing what you read online uh about you know the different lifts and the vortex Springs and everything but just goes to show you if you have a little bit of know-how and you know the right parts the right Springs you can run you know 550 lifts 530 lift upwards to 570 580 lift depending on what spring you're using again you got to go to a heavier Duty or spring and the funny part about this this spring is um 30 pounds more on the seat say it's good for 50 thou more lift but it's over double the price of the Springs we're going to be using for our LT for hot cam so that gets you in the idea that in that 530 lift range you can get a decently priced uh set of valve springs for a mild cam but as soon as you go past that you kind of gotta get into a little bit more expensive valve spring for the setup like this but these model Springs are going to work perfect for lt4 Hawking and I'm going to go ahead and get these heads assembled they are I did do some mild porting on them and I will do a video on the floor numbers for that I try to focus a little bit on the exhaust side so uh things are looking really good for our uh budget build here and things are going to come together real nice and looking forward to seeing what the dining rooms are so if you if you haven't subscribed to my channel and you like this kind of content Please Subscribe and don't forget to hit that like button thanks guys

Channel: CUTTER'S PERFORMANCE

Views: 21,127

Keywords: iMovie, vortecs, beehive springs, OBS, 355, 383, 400, sbc, vortec heads, L31

Id: UZosxGQyGMs

Length: 15min 34sec (934 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 12 2023