BUICK 455 vs THE WORLD

as you can see i'm here at west tech working on the buick 455 that awesome piece already ran some headers ran some nitrous on and as you can see a little bit here i'm finishing up the custom turbo kit but while i was working on it i couldn't help but wonder the buick is kind of synonymous with torque production ask anybody about a buick 455 and they're going to bring up oh yeah the stage one was the fastest production muscle car of the era used to beat up on hemis and ella six chevelles and you know yadda yadda all of you guys are going to say that but they also tell you the same thing that 455 makes a lot of torque and if we look at the dyno results from this motor which obviously this is not a stage one as a matter of fact it's not even an early high compression version it's the mid 70s low compression version but if we look at the dyno results it does indeed make a lot of torque and i'm using the lot word there it makes a lot of torque relative to the amount of horsepower that i made so it makes around 300 horsepower let's say and i made 475 foot-pounds of torque so that's a lot more torque than horsepower my question isn't does it make more torque than horsepower it does because it has hardly any cam shaft and stuff in it and that's kind of normal but how does that torque production actually compare to other big blocks that are very good at also making torque i mean this is a 455 there's also a 454 chevy there's also a 440 dodge like the motorhome motor there's a 464 so how does this buick 455 compare to those other big blocks in actual torque production now obviously the ideal candidate would be to take a 1970 stage one gs motor the high compression version with all of the good stuff on it the one that was rated at 510 foot pounds of torque every buick guy brings that up whenever there's an argument about what the ultimate muscle car is and they'll always bring that up i don't have that motor we have this mid 70s low compression version but it still makes a lot of torque but what i want to do is because i've run a lot of other stock big blocks you know from the wrecking yard because that's my jams but i've run a lot of other big blocks including recently the 440 that freiburger let me use for the motorhome 440 which was we also ran a turbo one which we're getting ready to do on this i've run turbos on junkyard 454 big blocks and on the 454 big block it's an interesting thing because normally i when i go there and i get these 450 or 454s i usually get a gen 6 motor because that's the latest version it's a hydraulic roller cam it had a it has a better cylinder head now it originally came fuel injected now recently i ran one with the factory fuel injection and then i run it the way we normally do which is to take all the fuel injection off and throw it away and then we run a dual plane carbureted intake with headers basically the same way that we ran this thing so it's an interesting comparison between this mid 70s version and a mid mid to late 90s version of the 454 and i know you're thinking that's not really a fair comparison and i agree but it's interesting that they're both stock motors and i kind of want to find out how they do but i've also run the previous generation 454 chevy and that's the gen 5 motor that's the throttle body injected version with the small peanut port heads which is the head that you want to go to if you're talking about really low speed torque production right now i've also run a stock gen 5 motor with a carbureted dual plane induction system with a four barrel carburetor and headers on it just the way that we ran this just the way that we ran the gen 6 motor now i've also run obviously that 440 motor home motor that freiburger let me use we ran it with stock exhaust manifolds we also ran it with headers we ran it with uh you know carbureted induction system because that's what it would have come with it wasn't fuel injected so so far we have an interesting comparison we have a buick 455 versus two different chevy 454s versus a 440 motorhome so really the only thing missing right now at least that i've tested is a 460 ford and as luck would have it i did a comparison between a gen gen 5 454 chevy and a 464. now the 464 that i picked was not the early high compression version which would do very well nor was it the later fuel injected version it was a carbureted version right before they switched over to fuel injection so i'm not sure how that exact actually rates but it can't be any worse than this mid 70s low compression version so i have the dyno data on a stock 460 ford as well with just a carbureted induction system and headers you know the way that we ran everything else so i thought it would be an interesting comparison so let's take a look at that data and compare all these different motors including that one chevy with fuel injection and carburation and then the gen 5 versus the gen 6 and we've got the 460 ford and a 440 motorhome and the buick 455. to compare our buick 455 to the other big blocks this is the one of our runs that we ran n a with the long tube headers and the reason i selected the long tube header run was because all of the other motors run with long tube headers i don't have stock exhaust manifolds for all of those and honestly i think if they were to run with stock exhaust manifolds it would probably hurt some of the other combinations more we've seen some pretty big changes in power from big block chevys for instance going from headers to the stock exhaust manifolds it's usually worth quite a bit of power the header upgrade is fairly nice on a big block chevy although it didn't show a great deal on this buick it was only about 10 horsepower we we ran the buick with the stock intake manifold stock head stock cam as far as we know a stock sharp block but the intake manifold was topped with that 750 brawler carburetor and i got a lot of combination or comments on the last video about that being not sized big enough for a 300 horsepower motor and you guys you really need to do the math on a 300 horsepower motor about how much carburetor that needs i know that it's 455 inches and it would want to be maybe a little bit bigger than a 300 horsepower 302 but it's still a 300 horsepower motor and a 750 carburetor is way more than big enough for a 300 horsepower motor but it came because it came with a quadrajet and 800 cfm quadrant everyone's saying oh it needs to be 800 if you guys like make sure to make a comment i'll run a test comparing 758 59 50 10 50 whatever you want i mean heck i ran a dominator on the 292 so why not put one on the buick so here is our buick combination our 455 it made 315 horsepower with the headers and peak torque checked in at 472 foot pounds so i want to compare this to our first big block and that's the 440 on loan from david freiberger that i ran the turbo on so here's the 440 and the 440 made more peak power than the buick did 440 made 337 horsepower and but peak torque was down at 444 foot pounds in fact if you look down here in the real low rpm range where it would be very important to a lot of guys um the buick was up from 425 foot pounds up to 471 foot pounds it was a big difference in torque at the 2800 rpm range but it did fall off so basically the 440 has kind of shifted the curve and it's interesting i want to make a note on the 440 and that's that when i when i did a cam upgrade on the 440 it didn't really show much of a power game it it makes me believe and i i don't know for sure that there were no markings on the camshaft on the camshaft that came out of there but it almost makes me believe that there might have been an rv cam or something in there i'm not sure but it was just odd that the camshaft that we tried didn't show a big gain in power like putting any kind of cam in compared to a stock cam in any one of these big blocks usually there's a fairly big jump in power so now let's take a look at our next combination maybe we'll take a look at the ford the 460. after comparing the buick 455 to the 440 mopar chrysler dodge i want to take a look at a comparison between the buick and we're going to take a look at the torque compared to a 464 464 it obviously is a little bit bigger a little bit more displacement and it's a unique combination of bore and stroke but the thing with this is i don't i'm not sure that this particular 460 that we're going to look at is really a shiny example of what they can do or what they have to offer i want you guys to let me know if you've ever run a stock one on the dyno let me know what it made and let me know if you think that this is realistic but i did a comparison between a 460 ford and a 454 chevy and the 454 chevy was a gen 5 motor the throttle body one but on this 460 ford it didn't make very much power or very much torque it made 298 horsepower and 438 foot pounds of torque so as you can see it's down from the buick basically everywhere until the very top but i'm not sure that this is indicative of what a good running 460 would do and maybe it is maybe this is what they do but i i've only run one other 460 from the wrecking yard but as it turned out it had been rebuilt it was already 30 over when we took the heads off to do the head swap and it made quite a bit more power than this so that's one of the problems with going to the wrecking yard and finding a motor is it we you know a lot of times we don't know if something's been done to it like even on this buick there's a rebuild tag on the on the head a temperature tag so it tells me that at one time in its life it obviously had some kind of work done on it and we don't know until we tear it apart find out what's going on i'm curious to see on the buick if it's got the factory chain in and timing gear i've been told that those are the later ones like the mid 70s i'd like to find out if that's true and and maybe adjust that we're definitely going to put a cam in it but it would be interesting to see if we um advance that cam if it you know made more power especially down low i think if we advance the cam i think it would pick up torque which would be interesting not that the big doesn't already have enough but let's take a look now at a small or a big block chevy so our next comparison with the buick 455 is a 455 chevy and this one came out of a gen 5 it's the throttle body injected peanut port port-headed truck motors which in my opinion may be some of the worst ones that they ever made it's just not a good combination the thing i do like about the gen 5 motor it's a 4-volt block as are all gen 5 motors and gen 6 motors all four bolts so they're a good starting point it's just that some of the gen 5 motors and all the gen 6 motors they didn't come with provisions for a mechanical fuel pump if a guy wants a mechanical fuel pump obviously you've got to run an electric one on that some of the gen 5 stuff did come with mechanical fuel punches they were switching over from carburation to fuel injection but the throttle body injection is just not good from a performance standpoint the best thing you can do is take that off and put a standard carburetor on there which is what we did and by the way on the ford and on the um dodge they both had aftermarket intake manifolds on them uh the dodge did i the ford actually had a factory intake manifold the factory cast iron intake manifold so this one is a gen phi 454 with a dual plane and a 750 carburetor which i know is too small for everything here's the gen 5 454 and as you can see it makes a little bit more power out of the top and let me know what you guys think and let me know in the comments do you think that this is because we used an aftermarket intake manifold on there will we see that same kind of thing if we put an edelbrock like a performer or an air gap or something like that assuming that they make an air gap for the buick i'm fairly new to the buick scene but if we put an aftermarket intake manifold is it going to pick up at the top and maybe lose power down low kind of the comparison that we're seeing here this motor was also run this was a flat tappet motor and it was also run with long tube headers but if you as you can see this thing made the chevy made 333 horsepower and peak torque checked in that 448 foot-pounds but it's happening quite a bit later than the buick is it's happening out at 3 500 rpm where with the buick peak torque came in at you know 20 27 or 2800 rpm so it's definitely more of a low rpm kind of thing that could be camshaft it could be the the cylinder heads are smaller although i don't know how much smaller they can be than the peanut ports but now let's take a look and see what happened when we stepped up to the gen 6 big block chip well so far it looks like it's kind of true the duke is making lots of low speed power down especially in the 2000 2500 rpm range it's making peak torque earlier than these other combinations it seems like so maybe there's something to how much torque this thing really made especially if it was high compression and had the stage one deal and all this stuff although i think that the stage one would shift it out a little bit you guys can let me know i don't know where these things made peak power because this is the only one i've ever run but now let's see a comparison between the buick 455 and chevy 454 but a later generation i mean this thing is you know 20 years newer than the buick was so this thing was from 96 to 2000 and it's a gen 6 and this is what we'll start off with the one that we ran carbureted so this was a this made quite a bit of power as a matter of fact and this is typically what they do this thing made 370 horsepower and peak torque checked in at 476 foot-pounds so it's making as much or more torque than the buick did but it's doing it out later although it's not sacrificing a ton of power down low but this is a much later much more sophisticated engine than the 1975 buick 455 it's a 97 or 98 6454 so it has a hydraulic roller cam it has more compression than the buick it has basically better cylinder heads because the the this vortec motor these last generations for the 454 had um standard size oval ports very small efficient combustion chambers and you know it was just a better combination we ran this with the dual plane intake and a 750 carburetor and long tube headers just like everything else but you can see that it and and the other thing that we're not looking at at any of these is i'm not looking at the specific cam timing of each one of these it might be that a lot of these have cam shafts that are 10 or 15 degrees more duration than the buick was it's designed to make power down low so these things might have more cam timing there's a lot of different things going on here so it's not really a direct back-to-back dust it's just interesting kind of cool stuff but let's take a look now and see i want to show you just include the last comparison before we go and get to the conclusion let's take a look at a comparison between this was with a dual plane carburetor and this was the same motor with the factory efi we ran it fuel injected it just you know optimized the power or the timing and air fuel just like we do with any carbureted combination so here's the fuel injected version and the fuel injected version now is in red and the carbureted version as a matter of fact i'm going to get rid of the buick so that we don't confuse things so our blue run is the fuel ejected run and the red run is the carbureted run so you can see the efi manifold because it has long runners and stuff and it's designed to make torque down low because that's all he cared about with this truck motor made more power than the dual plane you know more torque all the way up to 3600 but then fell down below the power production of the carbureted combination you know thereafter and as this went farther and farther out because that efi intake is not designed to make you know high horsepower it's designed for torque it's in the range down where it wants to be you know down to 2500 to 3500 range so that's the comparison between the efi versus carburation and it kind of and the buick compared to a lot of other big blocks so this was kind of cool stuff but i need to get back to testing because i've got i've designed the turbo system for the buick and that's going up and i cannot wait to run some boost let's get to our conclusion okay guys what'd you think about our comparison between our torque master buick 455 and the other big blocks i know it's not a direct back-to-back comparison because the only way to do that is to have like dedicated versions of each one of those motors that came out at the same period of time ideally they would be in perfect condition and not wrecking yard motors which tends to throw a wrench into the whole comparison thing because we have no idea how well people took care of these i haven't even taken the valve covers off this thing yet and i'm getting ready to turbo charge it the same thing with a lot of the the wrecking yard motors that i go get the big buck chevys and the big black fords and stuff the big block ford to me seemed like it was down from where it should have been but i don't have a bunch of other 464 data of that era to compare it to like i do with the other chevy's and i don't have a lot of data on a buick 455 to compare this to because this is my only one so and the same thing with the 440 motor home motor um it made pretty good power but i honestly don't know if that's good or average or great because i've only run that particular 440 motorhome motor and i don't really have anything to compare it to but i think it was an interesting comparison with all those big blocks and if you look at especially down low where i was able to run these and i didn't get to run all those down at 2000 rpm but really way down low this butte tends to kind of excel at torque production so maybe there's something to all those buick guys saying that the buick 455 is the torque master let me know what you guys think guys make sure to comment make sure to like share subscribe ring the bell do all that stuff i'll get going on this turbo kit because that information's coming up

Channel: Richard Holdener

Views: 73,431

Rating: 4.9486117 out of 5

Keywords: OTHER GUYS, BUICK, 455, BBC, BBF, BBD, DODGE, CHEVY, FORD, BIG BLOCKS, TORQUE

Id: 3hWgN-5ZLa8

Length: 17min 55sec (1075 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 07 2020