Budget Mods for Big Power! | Engine Masters | MotorTrend

bam watch this video and you might save a buck because you can decide if you can live with the power of the budget flat tap at camshaft versus the bucks up rollercam so it's not bad looks good yeah yeah very good man that thing's a buzz saw something grand i know you like rpm oh man i love it don't you love it when guys say they like the 327s because they rev higher yeah i know we have 400 inches here they just went it goes 7000 rpm hydraulic flat tapped of all things so here's our baseline with the flat tap at camshaft it made 486.5 pound feet of torque and up here in the horsepower it's really flat through here it's making a range of 494 to 496 horsepower the peak being 496 at 6200 but we're all stoked this thing actually ran cleanly to 7000 rpm if you were drag racing that i mean you wouldn't shift it at the power peak at 62. where i mean look at the way it carries all the way to seven well would you shift that thing at seven definitely and then let it fall back down into here and then you're using all that meat and this thing's pretty cool because you're launching the thing with like a 3 500 stall converter you're just getting into the torque curve or even a clutch 4 000 yeah right in there that's pretty good i like it i'm i'm more enthused than i thought i might be yeah me too we're going to be more enthusiastic when we put the roller in it it's a really pretty curve though there's no funny stuff with valve control issues or any dips or anything that's a really good looking curve so that's a happy thing a rollercam's happier so are we done yeah let's go install it oh i thought it was like beer time i'm happy with it we have to change it so steve and i are changing the cam [Music] so we have the roller cam all installed now and ready to fire it up it's going to make more power but there's no reason to assume that it would take different ignition timing right no i don't know and the jetting will probably solve itself yeah i mean we'll take one one good look at but i think the timing is going to be pretty much determined by combustion chamber and dome and you know cylinder head so oh yeah that's way better let's look at the overlay of that versus the flat tap it our official run with the roller cam 492.9 feet of torque 517.5 horsepower let's overlay the flat tap and see how much better it is everywhere in the curve oh not as much better down here below 4300 as i thought that i was saying i thought it would diverge it did but up here when you start picking up engine speed above 4 500 look at that the roller is way additional airflow so what did we deliver the bam bam hydraulic roller i wanted to be a hydraulic flat tapping guy but i'm convinced now oh i don't know i'm gonna go the other way i was really impressed with that 292 mega cam i was surprised it went to 7000 rpm and it made pretty good power and it confirmed i think my suspicion that like when i was 17 years old and throwing a paw cam shaft in my 383 mo bar it might not have been that bad but the takeaway i always think of it from like the average muscle car guys perspective which is yeah we keep saying this a flat tap of cam this setups about 250 bucks for the cam and lifters if you're gonna go with a roller conversion and the roller lifters and cam and the distributor gear that you might need and the cam button and push rods closer to a thousand bucks so you got to decide if that extra 750 to 800 bucks is really worth it for the project that the average viewer is putting together and i think most people building an engine to this level 500 horsepower probably are not even considering a hydraulic flat tablet to begin with and some of them might now go that wasn't that bad it depends on who you are you might be that guy who wants to get the hydraulic roller spend the money it might not mean that much to you or you might be the bucks down guy who can make pretty close you know same rpm pretty close to pretty good power and save a bundle yeah so i'm usually that guy i know yeah now you like the hydraulic roller better than ever and i like the hydraulic flat tap it better than ever not that i would pick it every time but i was just more impressed with it than i expected to be this engine is based on the architecture founded in 1955 and they made these things all the way through 2003 in some vans and chevy still sells them as crate engines the 350 which is what this is started in 1969 there's a zillion of them now let's look at the absolute basic package that we're going to be running on this show the engine is a crate motor from a place called first mate automotive i bought it from summit racing for 399 bucks i mean it is basic cast pistons cast crank minuscule flat tap at camshaft nothing trick but for that price you get everything from the long block including a camshaft front cover oil pan valve covers but not the accessories let me show you how i package this thing out up top holley's most affordable and basic carburetor this is an aluminum version of the 1850 which is a 600 cfm vacuum secondary single feed carburetor our intake manifold is a basic low-rise dual plane from speedmaster that's 152 bucks the ignition system is an hei which gm came out with in i think 1974. it means high energy ignition it has a coil and a module in the trigger and everything right there that's your whole ignition system 136 bucks the excel 4000 series wires are about 40 bucks these are flotec 1 and 5 8 inch headers for a early chevelle 152 bucks on my left here i've got the swirl port head that came off of our crate engine this was used in 91 and earlier chevy trucks and basically it's a complete turd even though it looks like a vortech head because it has those center bolt valve covers and stuff it's not this is a vortech head these were used on 350 chevys with the l31 designation from 1996 to the year 2000 they were only in trucks and suvs and the thing is you can still pick them up in junkyards that's the great thing about them there are some drawbacks though the biggie is that they won't handle a lot of valve lift without machining because the bottom of the retainer hits the top of the valve guide you can only put about 450 thousands left in them before you run into a problem they also have press-in rocker studs just like this swirl port head and you get a lot of valve spring pressure on them those tend to pop out so you want to modify them to have a screw-in stud just like this one has been modified the other thing is you'll often find in the aftermarket heads that they'll put bigger valves in them blueprint engines actually did this set of vortex for us and they've got a 2.02 inch intake valve instead of the stock 194. the really big deal here though is that the intake port on the vortec is so much superior than it is on the swirl port it's ridiculous and if you look at the chamber this is your standard smog era garbage bathtub of a combustion chamber whereas here on the vortec you've got a much nicer heart-shaped chamber more of a modern design and this is 64 cc's instead of 76 that means that we're going to take our crate engine from 8.25 to 1 with the swirl port head to 9.2 to 1 with the vortech head and that is going to be a really big deal next up you're gonna have to consider your intake manifold if you're changing from a swirl port head or an older one to a vortec head now this is a speed master intake manifold it is designed to run both the tpi pattern or the classic old school pattern that you'd find in like a 69 camaro 74 monte carlo the old school pattern all of the bolts going at the same angle the tpi pattern on this swirl port head is different in the middle just like it would be on like an 87 tpi camaro the speedmaster intake has adapters to do both but it won't fit a vortech head because the vortech head intake has bolts that go straight up and down and they also take a different intake gasket for that reason now this intake manifold for the classic setup is about 152 bucks this one for the vortex almost 170 so you do need to keep that in mind if you're being budget conscious speaking of which if you don't want to scrounge the junkyards for your vortech heads i like a place called skogen dickey it's a chevy dealership and they offer a package of brand new heads with all of these upgrades on them they're 890 bucks but you can do it much cheaper if you scrounge on your own and when you do you're gonna make a whole bunch more power or at least that's the theory and we're gonna go find out if it's true right now killing it that's a lot of people that's totally worth it that's way over 100 horsepower let's see what it did wow we just made 397 pound-feet of torque at 4 000 rpm and 364.9 horsepower at 5500 we made a hundred and thirty horsepower look like heroes huh it's like a 50 game see thing is i think there's a ton of guys out there who are dealing with older muscle car v8s and they've got between 400 and 600 horsepower and they don't really want to deal with an electric fuel pump they don't want the wiring they don't want the plumbing they don't want the return line they don't want the rocket science they fear it for whatever reason and they want to run mechanical i've been that guy i've also been the guy with a lot of struggles actually trying to make four or 500 horsepower go all the way down the drag strip without running out of fuel and we're going to show you exactly that as we test four different mechanical fuel pumps on our little small block chevy so there you go we made a change removed this 5 16 inch fuel line and installed 3 8 so you can see that it's bigger so we're going to go test now and find out if it makes a difference in that pump's ability to make flow and pressure [Music] it made a difference made a little different yeah it did i think it made quite a bit of difference i can't wait to see let's pull up the graph there you go that is the difference between 5 16 fuel hose in red and 3 8 inch line in black dolcic and i were all the time saying man people overkill fuel systems you don't need all that stuff but the three-eighths line thing i believe in it more now oh yeah you really do need the three-eighths thing is believing yeah that's the coolest thing i've learned so far today whoa that's pretty good yeah basically started at uh six seven spiked up to six eight and the worst case scenario was six two and finished at six four let's compare it to the other pumps though that's where i think we're gonna really see the differences when we compare it to something else compared to the carter super pump with the 3 8 line oh yeah but you can see the difference of whereas this is right around six point eight and this is right around five and a quarter pretty decent uh curves i think i think it's going to show that this one has a little less change yeah this is that 120 pump with the uh smaller line this is the 40 gallon 15 pump yep yeah [Music] all over the place yeah so really what you're buying with a fuel pump at this point is like consistency of fuel pressure and i guess just capacity capacity trust yeah well let's look at flow it's probably still flowing the same because at this point the engine is just using what it's using so there's your volume i think we had an air bubble there an air bubble or something like that those little turbines are actually super sensitive all it takes is a little air bubble to give them a blip like that so sometimes there's an anomaly but let's look at it compared with uh that 120 gallon the final d test so this is the 120 gallon pump with the uh 3 8 line it's roughly the same because now we're at the point of it's what the engine is getting engines pulling what it needs to through the carburetor my opinion is is this is the right pump out of what we have done with these fuel lines for this engine i think really if you've got a 300 horsepower engine it doesn't need this pump if you've got a 700 horsepower engine you're going to need this pump or something even bigger so i think it's a matter of demands but this thing is so much more stable that really was interesting it's a test i've never done before i've never even thought of it before so i think it's pretty cool i really wanted to be able to walk out of here like the crotchety naysaying dinosaur and go you don't need a trick fuel system i can run 500 horsepower on any fuel pump i really wanted to be that guy i know kind of why i set up a test oh i know but you found that you were wrong i was completely wrong i can't do it why i actually knew i was going to be wrong but i was hoping that i was closer to right how's your persona holding up i'm pretty good really yeah because i thought for sure you would like be on my side you'd want to see this turd actually just cranking out the power well i really wanted to see this auto parts special replacement style pump perform better that would be the key the 15 one would be good but let's conclude what we think of this one knowing what we know now i would run this on 400 horsepower all day and not worry about it if you're on a super tight budget and you're not making super high horsepower that guy is not too bad it really isn't bad but i think when you crest up north of 450 horsepower is when you've got to really start paying attention i got to be honest as much as my go-to carter super pump that i used on everything you know in the 80s with nitrous or whatever as good as it did on this that's good i now actually believe that there is merit in overkilling your fuel system and getting that 170 gallon per hour unit on your 500 horse motor you

Channel: MotorTrend Channel

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Keywords: motortrend, motor trend, motor trend channel, motortrend on demand, motortrend full episodes, engine masters, roadkill, roadkill garage, engines, big block chevy, big block engine, engine mods, engine upgrades, engine mods cheap, cheap engine upgrades, cheap car mods, car mods, ls engine, big block, fuel pumps

Id: -PLTOL1jhRg

Length: 15min 34sec (934 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 06 2020