Big Block Fords Explained

hey everybody thanks for stopping by peak snake bite kit again hope everybody's doing well uh the other day i think was last week i did a video on small block ford's explained today we're gonna do it on big block boards explained like i mentioned before ford kind of had add on building engines and designing them a lot of different engine families a lot of different displacements and not everything interchanges with the other stuff and on and on and on so i want to clear up some of that just so you understand the babble i'm going through and if you're looking to build something for your car maybe you'll better understand uh when you start searching for this kind of hardware so here we go there's really two families of big block fords that someone would build for a hot rod or a cobra fire engines and 385s that's a joke this is really a ford edsel i don't know why we started calling that uh i'll go through these and a couple derivatives of these that are pretty cool so the fees came in a few different display well they came in a lot of displacements let me explain big blocks end up in trucks trucks they find these different needs for them a bigger engine a shorter stroke a longer stroke a big heavy engine that could never overheat when it's running really hard but it's small for better fuel mileage and blah blah blah blah blah not getting into those the ones i'm going to talk about are the common ones that would be being a hot rod so 390 never went a cobra it went in some gt mustangs that have warmed over four barrel and at the man pretty well okay there's a 427 and 428 that one and that one both came in what you would think looks like a 427 cobra this one was the high performance engine was developed for nascar was a very stout very well performing engine for the day and the 428 had not as expensive parts in it carol shelby could buy these from ford cheaper than he could buy these from ford so my understanding is some of the street cobra 427 cobras had 428s in them that even said 427 on the side big deal right but uh this one had a cross bolted main where it actually had a an oiling system that went into the crankshaft first because he ran really hard at in nascar and le mans and so on and then um so that was the super duty stout one right there's a really cool hybrid of this thing that's called a sock motor i'm going to spell it different it's a soahc single overhead cam single cam in each head and the idea was if we move the uh rocker arms and we move the push rods out of the way we can put a giant intake port right where the push rod used to be by putting a cam over the top there's a very exotic very limited production i don't think it actually came in a car there may have been some weird special order thing but it was used in drag racing used in top fuel for a little while they have a timing chain if you can picture a big you know v8 engine i mean it goes all the way around the whole thing they're i think seven or eight feet long i mean they're ridiculous i'm sure somebody makes a gear drive thing for it uh the very high revving uh they can make a bunch of horsepower but that is an exotic if you're building one of those is because you don't have a budget and you want something unique otherwise you're not dealing with uh sohc so these are the main ones here 427 is what we call the engine in any cobra nowadays it seems like you know you'll see a guy with a small block ford in it he says it's a 427 maybe it's poked out to 427 and stroked and board but this is the the real deal to fe like i mentioned before going over the different kits if you're buying uh one of the more expensive uh more accurate ones the curcum car or the actual share but shelby american continuation i don't think i've ever seen one of those that does not have an fe and usually not 427s it's usually we've got a a 427 piston a 428 crank and it's a 454 at least or there's a lot of them that are 468s and bigger so with them these things make 450 the the leaned on race versions back then they made 500 500 and a quarter uh the ones like with a 468 that are you know still drivable thing they're like 650 horsepower so you can make horsepower so much easier today than we could back then science right um so those are them the 385 series that's where you would get 429 or 460. these things and again truck engine derivatives of these who cares these are the ones you would build for a hot rod both of these are big both of these are big heavy engines and weighing in probably 200 250 pounds more than a small block ford and you're putting that right on top of the front tire that doesn't help the front to rear weight bias i mentioned in the small block ford video that i thought that if carol shelby could have waved a magic wand he would have put a 351 windsor instead of a 427. he he alluded to that in a video i saw yes a couple months ago anyhow because you want a 50 50 weight distribution and they really weren't that especially the monsters up front these things are even heavier it's a physically bigger engine i've seen them in there i saw one last pacific roadster up in by salem that had aluminum heads studded cylinder heads in one of those things i thought man that thing's going to be a runner right so derivatives this one the shotgun or the boss 429 they made less than a thousand of these mustangs uh they put this motor in it was made for nascar i think it got outlawed because it made a lot of horsepower um they came in 69 they made less than 500 cars 70 they made a few more than 500 cars something like that my brother roger had uh one of those had a 70 box 429 like probably the coolest mustang they ever made yeah i wish he still had it yeah he wishes he still had it anyway made a bunch of money on it and sold it back then so these are the ones another neat thing that happened with this one the boss 429 cylinder head somewhere in the early 80s nhra pro stock and i think ihra followed suit they switched rules in the 70s and into the early 80s it was a how much your car weighs versus how many cubic inch the engine is and they came up with how much your car could weigh because of that and guys would you know change crank cinema make the engine a little bigger and take on a couple extra pounds if they thought it would work better that way and it was a an ongoing thing all the time somewhere along the line they said we're going to make this simple car weighs 2 500 pounds has two giant dominator carburetors on it can be 500 cubic inches those are the rules of course a lot of other rules to go along with that maybe they were lighter than 2 500 pound but whatever anyway every ford guy in the country was scrambling for uh boss for 29 heads because nobody was making them there and i think john causey finally came around and started making them but they were scrambling to find these things that zapped up every boss 429 cylinder head uh that that was around that anybody could use and now they're very rare very expensive i hope that demystifies the big block ford stuff if i had an unlimited budget to put a motor in my car i would put a 427 fe looking thing in it it would be much much bigger than that um because it looks they look pretty cool and it's what came in there i'm not going to that extreme personally in my car probably going to spend 25 000 if you're going to have one of these it's going to make some power that's a lot of money you can build a pretty strong small block for ten thousand dollars that's going to make more than 500 horsepower so that's a draw was a drawback to me hey if you got money coming out of your ears do one of those they look really cool you put any of these in the front of your cobra you're gonna say wow when you drive it you're gonna love it if you have any other questions about these cars or stuff cobra related ford related hey put it in the comments i'll try and do a video on it i'm having fun doing this stuff i hope you guys like it please subscribe i'll see you on the next one

Channel: Pete's Snake Bite Kit

Views: 1,810

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: 427 Cobra, FE 427, 428 Cobra jet, SHOC 427, Boss 429, Boss 429 Mustang, stroker motor, 429 Ford, 460 Ford, Shelby Cobra, shelby cobra, muscle car, petes cobra, petes snake bite kit

Id: LUnBKDCZho4

Length: 8min 45sec (525 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 01 2020