Cheap 400HP SBC Vortec Head Combo!

[Music] what is going on guys pat in the shop and tonight we are going to talk about a 400 horsepower vortec headed small block combo the cheapest motor i've ever built uh that makes great power and this is a proven combo that i'm gonna talk to you about i know it makes uh 400 horsepower you know obviously give or take depending on a few factors but i'm going to give you a head cam combination bottom end every information that i can give you all all the information i should give you i should say uh that's going to get you around 400 horsepower i keep getting emails from guys about what cam to pick and this and that so i thought you know what i know this combination makes 400 horsepower so i am going to uh just give you the information and then you can you know maybe go with that exact combination or kind of adapt it a little bit to what you're uh building and so you can kind of have an idea of uh how it's all gonna work together to give you a little history on this motor combination uh i built it originally probably a couple years back now and it was just some spare parts i had left over i had a an old school flat tablet block that i got in trade in when i built another motor i had um like most of the heads and the rockers and everything i had all that stuff so i was like you know what i'm gonna put a real budget friendly motor together uh for someone uh i went flat tap a cam i picked a cam that you know was fairly cheap and stuff and just built a a good cheap motor uh for someone that would put in a cruiser and i ended up selling it to a guy really good guy uh dealt with them a bunch of times ever since i've sold the motor but he put this combination he told me oh he's just gonna use it uh for a cruiser because i put a cam in there it was kind of lumpy and stuff but he ends up taking this thing to the drag strip like every weekend all summer uh after i sold it to him revving it to six grand grand he was so happy with it he said the power is way out you know more than he ever expected and then he ended up taking it to the dyno and putting down some really good numbers with it and he was just so happy with it so it's a combination that i kind of put in my back pocket and i've used again uh for guys that want a budget build so we're going to start off with the bottom end and we're going to talk about what's that i'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty details of everything but i'm going to give you kind of a general summarization of what i use and then you can kind of um you know pick and choose from there so this motor i built was actually a 355 so what that is is a 350 stock stroke of 3.48 or some guys say three and a half and um a bore size of 4.030 so 30 over a stock 350 bore and what i use for that combination is uh summit pistons these are a really sweet deal uh use the summon pistons and i did recondition rods so the stock rods are okay in this power level uh arp rod bolts and then all resized but i went with a stock piston and it actually ended up being um very similar to the weight of the piston i took out so uh the combination it's always a good idea to have a everything balanced but if you're on a tight budget and you get a piston that's within a few grams uh a lot of guys don't but i always recommend bouncing but i'm just saying if you're on a tight budget you can do a piston swap as long as you get something relatively close in weight um so i went with uh a flat top piston that a lot of the stock uh chevy 350 pistons are dished so i went with uh stock compression height uh summit piston 30 over like i said flat top it flat top because this combination you want about nine and a half to ten to one compression and that's what i typically build with this cam and with those heads any more than that you can might run into detonation problems any less than that you're not gonna get the power goals that you want so nine and a half to one to one to ten to one compression somewhere in that range and typically with a 350 a flat top piston this is a i think a seven cc uh five or seven cc um uh valve relief piston uh will get you in that range with a vortech head i used a melling high volume pump which i used on all i used a three quarter inch pickup it was a four bolt main block um so all that stuff you know you can decide you could probably you know if you have a two bolt main block you'll probably be fine too but you're gonna need to swap out pistons just to get that compression ratio up and probably bore pour it out to freshen up uh here's a a good timing set if you're on a budget this is just the clois heavy duty c-3023 xsp double roller timing set it's a good price for any flat topic cam uh so that's basically the stuff i used and like i said all the little detail stuff you can get into i used a stock style oil pan nothing fancy no windage tray like i said it was just a really basic rebuild kind of performance but this combination end up being great so there's your bottom end let's move on to the heads next used a vortech head uh a lot of people seem to hate on these heads but there's no doubt that these vortec heads are great and if you've seen my other videos you know i'm a big fan of the vortech heads they do have their issues they do crack sometimes uh you know more than i'd like to more than i'd like to see on the deck surface because the decks are thin but if you can find a good set and i find typically if they're an older set that hasn't cracked yet usually they're not going to crack so uh and then don't hold me to that they still can crack if you overheat them and stuff but usually if you find a good old set and have them you know cleaned up and resurfaced you'll usually be fine but make sure you take off minimal amount off those decks if you're getting them resurfaced so i took a set of vortech heads on that build i did uh my beehive spring kit so i sell a beehive spring kit if you have um if you're interested in that send me an email uh there's uh an email address down below i sell a beehive spring kit that can go on here to accommodate uh up to 580 lift but on this particular combination i did my standard lift kit which is good up to 5 30. uh i did a mild pocket port job on that one where basically you just go in and clean up the little bit of ridge um around the valve to help with a little bit of the valve shrouding uh you know inside the from the transition from the runner to the valve so i just went in and cleaned it up honestly nothing crazy didn't do a crazy poor job on it just basically cleaning up that that that lip lip and if you uh feel it on your vortech heads you'll know exactly what i'm talking about and it does make a little bit of a difference but you don't have to go to town and and port the crap out of them you can do a little bit of cleanup in here but don't reshape the hole if you don't know what you're doing with porting especially with vortech heads you don't want to reshape anything drastically because you can affect the actual performance of the head so basically that's it i took a vortech head uh put my beehive springs on it i did screw in studs and if you if you want to know how to do screwed inside easily at home i do have another video uh so check that out as you can see actually this is the head i used in the video and i've done these four studs are screw in and these four studs are not you can see they're the incognito um screw-in studs they actually look like uh stock um studs but they're actually so you don't have to worry about pulling them out uh so i did that i used just a comp cans roller tip rocker arm 1.5 ratio and that was it for the heads that's all you need to do on uh on this combination next up let's look at the camera just for demonstrating purposes but this is i just want to show you example of a flat tabby cam because that's what i used in this combination to save some money uh typically i like roller cams and you've probably heard me talk about that if you've watched my other videos i normally like roller cams but this was an older block with no provision for rollercam and i didn't want to go retrofit cam just because again i was trying to keep the price down we're trying to make cheap horsepower here and uh typically a flat topic cam you're about a quarter of the price of a rollercam maybe less by the time you factor in the lifters so uh for this particular climate combination i went with a melon cam and the melon cam i went with was a melling 2-2-301 that cam has 480 lift intake and exhaust with the 1.5 rocker arms uh it's got 288 288 duration at 232 32 intake and exhaust at 50 thou so it's a really basic simple cam uh it's got uh it's a 109 i believe yeah 109 um lobe separation angle so it gives you that nice kind of choppy hot rod sound it's got a decent amount of duration and it seems to really combo well with the vortech heads especially after a little bit of work done to them so it's a like i said flat tablet it's cheap uh the cam itself you can get the cam for under 100 bucks and then always match it up with a good set of lifters i just used a set of melon lifters with it to match the cam just make sure obviously with flat tapper cams you do the proper break in procedure and use the proper oil or you're going to have a little bit of headache when it comes to flat topic cams of wiping those lobes out so to top that combination off so now we got the bottom end together um we got the heads on the intake manifold i went with was an rpc uh aluminum dual plane intake not an air gap or anything fancy it was just a cheaper intake uh similar to like uh edelbrock copy so jegs mix some like that uh it's good up to i think 5500 rpm they claim um it's just a basic uh aluminum intake dual plane aluminum intake i did a little bit of casting cleanup uh in the ports to kind of port match to the gaskets in the heads of the vortech heads um basically that's it it was just uh ready to drop on uh we we ended up topping that off he put a 600 cfm carb on that one i originally did but anything from a 650 or 600 to probably a 670 carb would work good on this combination if you want to go a little bit bigger and jet down that's fine too but this combination gives you a really nice classic hot rod sound it's got that nice lumpy idle uh it's very drivable though uh he runs it it's like a a hot rod he drives quite often in the chevelle in particular uh and everyone else i've used this cam on it seems to be really happy with as far as just getting that hot rod sound and the power so there you go guys hopefully that answers uh the guys who've been asking me about how to make 400 horsepower with a small block chevy it seems like a lot of guys want to get right around that 400 horsepower mark that are on a budget and you know what if you're using a vortech head that's not that hard to do with just a 355 or a 357 and maybe even a 350 shouldn't be an issue either but typically you got to change out pistons to get um that compression ratio up and you're probably going to need to get it board anyway so most of the time you end up with a 355 so you know 400 horsepower is fairly achievable for fairly cheap your biggest cost is probably going to be getting the machine work done um hopefully you know you there's you could buy a whole rotating assembly or like i said just change pistons uh if you can find a good set of vortech heads but there's other options out there like i said uh here we have a set of the engine quest and here we have a set of the iron eagles so uh i'm still working on doing a comparing a comparison test with between all these and getting them on the flow bench and uh you know doing maybe a little bit of porting and seeing what we can get them up to comparable wise and then uh you guys can decide which way you want to go with them um you know we gotta we gotta stop hating on the vortex i know they crack but they really do work well they really do for a stock head of uh you know the old school small block we can't compare them to the ls stuff we're just not there but as far as a stock small black head for cheap i've been seeing a lot of comments and emails from guys where they're getting sets for a hundred bucks and they're not cracked so you can get a set for 100 bucks that aren't crack you're laughing because you got a heck of a head with 400 horsepower plus capability for a hundred bucks so uh that's that's a win in my books um not everyone makes a thousand horsepower so uh please like and subscribe um i'm putting out videos all the time uh comment below if you have any questions or send me an email send me an email if you're interested in the vortex spring kits i got available uh they've been selling uh quite a bit lately uh with the with the videos i've been putting out and guys seem to be really interested in the vortech heads just like me so anyways thanks guys

Channel: CUTTER'S PERFORMANCE

Views: 161,149

Keywords: vortec, sbc, 400hp, vortec heads, small block chevy

Id: OiOmBtA7vAg

Length: 13min 53sec (833 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 27 2020