DIRT CHEAP SBC MODS?

okay guys let's see a show of hands who wants to make more power okay everybody right everybody wants to make more power who wants to do it as cheaply as possible come on you in the pajamas get that hand up we all want to make more power and we all want to do it is inexpensively as possible guess what today is your lucky day in this video we've got a ton of low buck upgrades for a small-block 350 before we get to that makes your like share subscribe ring the bell I'm not even wait until the end of the video come on guys help me out do all that stuff okay in this video loave up performance mods we've got two different cylinder heads we've got a bunch of intakes we've got a couple of camshafts we've got a ton of stuff so let's get going demonstrate what is possible for a low buck 350 build up approach what I did was we combine your just kind of basic short block with a couple very inexpensive aftermarket upgrades basically the heads can intake now on this particular combination I didn't run the baseline like the stock combination but what I can tell you is if I go to the wrecking yard pickup let's say a Vortech 350 and take the fuel injection off and put a dual plane intake and a carburetor or a distributor on it it'll make somewhere between we've had some make as low as 290 most of them are closer to 310 horsepower when we run them basically in that stock trim but what I was trying to do is create something that would be a low buck deal so what we did here you're probably wondering about hey what the heck's going on at the top of the power curve we're gonna get into that just second but what I did was we took a basic short block in this case it started out as an L 98 the original tune pork short block just because that's what Westec had laying around you could go to the junkyard and get a Vortech short block you could get basically any sort of 350 short block and just start with that because what you're going to get other than the Vortech heads which are fairly decent but if you go to seda 80-82 heads or any of the previous ones they're just not gonna make a ton of power but all you want really is the short block so what we did was we picked up we had that stock l98 short block and then we applied a set of Pro Comp or now speed master they're cnc ported 210 CC heads with 64 CC chambers but they were cnc ported we installed a mild comp came because he want to make power you're definitely gonna have to spend a little bit of money at least for a camshaft and that was a comp extreme energy 270 hydraulic roller because this was a hydraulic roller block that was a - 18 to 24 or 50 and I'll go ahead and put the rest of the specs up here you guys can take a look at that but it's a fairly small cam then we put a single plane intake on here because again and we were trying to get a low but kind of approach and this was another get a pro comp single plane intake and then a 750 carburetor on it so kind of your standard deal you could run an HEI distributor you can even get that from the wrecking yard if you're getting your recognized our combination but here's what happened and it's interesting and this is something that you definitely have to look out for when you're getting especially low buck aftermarket heads but you want to make sure that you have an eval spring it and that was the problem here now our combination produced you know 380 horsepower so it's kind of on the right track and what we like 392 foot-pounds of torque nice flat torque curve up there but you can see the power just crashed out here and that's not a function of airflow or anything like that that's just valve spring we ran into valve float so the first thing obviously we had to do was when and this is why we were on the buy now and this is one of the things that you learn when you put heads on that are assembled and already have a Springs on them sometimes they're not they're not efficient there's not enough so here happen we cured the valve spring problem we just put a set of Springs from comp cams on it and you can see now that we were able to Rev the motor out the motor made 385 horsepower we to increase the peak power that much but now it wasn't just crashing with with insufficient valve spring so even though we didn't start out with a baseline we're gonna learn a lot of stuff here going on so we've got a lot of modifications were makin to this to improve the power up but because we had a set of ported heads we had a decent cam we had a decent intake and we figured you know this thing should really be making more power so let's figure out now how to make more power after curing our spring problem so you know this thing really I want this thing to make more power so what would happen if originally we just chose a different camshaft rather than that 270 camp so we chose something that's a little bit more aggressive and something that's gonna make a little more power of going in then we would have only spent money once and that's why I do this testing for you guys so you guys can figure out what you want to do which direction you'd want to go before you make that decision so here's what happened when we installed a different camshaft this is another comp cam and this was an extreme energy 282 and it was a 232 36 degree duration split so it set up quite a bit from our previous cam from our to be 70 and as you can see it really helped out with power I'll go ahead and put the rest of the specs up here on the comp cam so you guys can take a look at it you know it's good stuff but you can see it picked up power from about 3,900 rpm and then carried it out nicely this thing now is revving now past 6000 rpm made peak power right at 6000 you know trade it a little bit down here and again that's why I do these tests so you guys can decide hey I don't want to lose any down low I'm only interested at the top whatever you guys need but this is what happened we installed more camshaft and now our our low buck for our 350 inch small block was making fairly decent powers making over 400 horsepower so that's a good amount but we weren't done there so what I did was I'm going to show you what happened when we tried a different intake manifold we still had the single playing intake manifold on there which isn't always the best choice for a Street driven combination so what I did was we installed a dual plane intake from procom now this dual plane did kind of what it's supposed to it made more power down low down here in the 3,500 to 4,000 range but it didn't make you know it lost power up top which is again something we expect from a single plane dual plane combination and it did make less power up at the top but again I don't think this is really a good trade-off I don't think even that extra power and that just little range right there is enough to offset the loss down low I just don't think this is the combination that I would do so we tried one more intake manifold and it goes to show you that there definitely is a difference between even the same style manifold from manufacturers so installed another single plane intake and this one was from professional products which is a fairly another fairly low buck deal but you can see we got good gains there so it was more of a high-rise design you no longer runners just basically a better design single plane and that pushed our power up to 431 horsepower so that was a good combination you know that single plane intake and we're using the same 750 Holley carburetor which work well our peak torque was up to 414 foot-pounds of torque so this thing was working fairly well I made one more intake manifold change after this and I'm go ahead and show you that I'll get rid of the cam just so it doesn't get too busy here this is our single plane intake with the bigger cam here's what happened when I kind of went and bought a name brand I want got a Edelbrock rpm air gap which is always a good intake manifold on a small-block Chevy so here's Otis half moon we installed the air gap now this is more of what we expect from a single playing dual plane kind of combination so the dual plane the air gap made more power from 3000 and it would have made more power down below that but from 3000 out to 40 you know 4900 almost and then made a little bit less power down low so again this is the trade-off that you guys need to decide hey do I am I willing to have that sacrifice do I just only care about the big end stuff you know from 4900 to 6,500 you guys get to decide if this trade-off is worthwhile for me this is a street car I almost always pick the rpm air gap if you want a little bit more put a half inch spacer on it you can usually pick up a little bit of power at the top and if I'm the only time really I'm thinking about going to a single plane is if I have a lot of camshaft or a lot of displacement or in a lot of our p.m. that's that's kind of where of those things shine so now let's take a look and see what happened after we installed a different set of cylinder heads after running through all the different intake configurations on our modified lobe up 350 we decided to figure out well what happens if a guy just put the standard heads the ads cast like a hundred and ninety CC has cast Pro Comp heads the 2:10 like full cnc ported ones they're a little bit they're obviously less expensive than the porter ones and can they support this power level like where would the power weak and they still make this power and not have to pay for the price of the port it is well that's a good question so we ran that test here is our combination with the ported heads and the cam and the professional products intake yeah they all had same headers they all have the same 750 Holley and stuff but here's what happened when we replaced the 210 CC CNC ported heads with 190 CC as cast heads let's take a look at that so as expected the smaller heads the as cast heads they flow less the chamber sizes were the same on the 2 and they but they didn't make the same power not surprisingly I mean the added flow from the CNC heads definitely made more power the power output dropped down to four hundred and seven horsepower peak torque wasn't down a lot to four hundred and ten foot-pounds as you could see the smaller heads actually made a touch more power down low not a lot those are kind of essentially the same if you look at the difference there it's about three 99% four or five you're talking about six foot pounds at the most that's not a ton the added float took off from about 4700 you know all the way out and had we had more engine basically if this was a 383 or had more compression or had more cam shaft we probably would see even greater gains from the CNC ported heads but here's all the data and you guys get to choose would you pick the low buck route and and the ultra low buck route and pick the standard as cast heads or would just step up a little bit for the cnc part of the head so then if you went up later on and wanted to make even more power at least you'd have enough head folks in my opinion it's always better to have even if you want to run a mild cam have more head flow and that's exactly what the ALS combinations do if you look at an ls3 stock ls3 it has a you know it has a 430 horsepower cam with 600 horsepower cylinder heads so it's in good combination I always liked more cylinder head and that's what we had here let's get to our conclusion ok guys what do you think about our low buck build up on our small-block 350 now which way would you go would you pick that really inexpensive as cast performance heads or the slightly more expensive cnc heads you know just in case you wanted to upgrade later on you have a little something extra now what about the camp's yet would you pick the small can for all that low speed drivability and power or the top-end rush of the bigger king what about intake manifolds bottom end dual plane drivability good power or at the top end rush of this single plane now here's the important part it doesn't matter which one you choose because that's not as important there's no wrong answer the important thing is we get to choose that's what makes America so great Amritsar older guys thanks for watching lots more coming up I'll keep testing

Channel: Richard Holdener

Views: 126,359

Keywords: sbc, 350, intakes, heads, cams, upgrade, low buck

Id: 1Zd-jn0ixG8

Length: 11min 59sec (719 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 08 2020