HOW TO: JUNKYARD 500-HP 5.3L LS-CAN MY NA 5.3L LS MAKE 500 HP WITH A HEADS, CAM AND INTAKE UPGRADE?

[Music] hey guys richard here thanks for watching the video and thanks for supporting the channel the question for today hey richard how do i make 500 horsepower with a stock bottom end 5.3 liter without boost i'm not going to show you one way to do it i'm going to show you three in this video i'm going to show you not one not two but three different 5.3 meter stock bottom end combinations that exceeded 500 horsepower and the key element there is that they are stock bottom end stock block stock crank stock rods and stock pistons and really the stock pistons is the critical thing when we're talking about stock bottom end motors exceeding 500 na horsepower because the stock piston limits piston to valve clearance it also limits the available cam we can use and smaller cams mean less power so let's check out three different combinations that made more than 500 horsepower hey guys before we get going on this video make sure to join me live nightly 7 p.m pacific standard time if you've got questions about any aspect performance cylinder heads camshafts any motor doesn't have to be an ls doesn't have to be a small block chevy can be a big block can be a honda i've tested it all if you've got a question chances are i have an answer or somebody else on the live feed also might have an answer if you've got a question remember join us live 7 p.m live on youtube let's get to our video so to get things started and our three different 500 horsepower 5.3 liter stock bottom end combination so we first need to take a look at basically a bone stock 5.3 and this is typical of what i see when we get something from the wrecking yard when we run it in bone stock stock trim and by bone stock trim i mean it's not stock when we run it on the engine dyno we run it with no accessories just an electric water pump we run it with long tube headers we run it with a holley or fast management system and we run it with an open throttle body so no air intake these things always make more power than they're rated at because we're testing them in a different procedure differently than they do from the factory so this thing will make more than it's rated these are a 5 3 like this an lm7 excuse me will typically be somewhere near 300 horsepower uh plus or minus rated from the factory depending on what application it's used on but when we run them with long tube headers and an optimized two and we run them a little colder with no air intake and no accessories and stuff they make more power this one made 354 horsepower at 5300 rpm and 381 foot-pounds of torque at 4 000 rpm you can see it's got its as we would expect of a truck motor it's torquey it makes more torque than horsepower giving us a good indication what these things are really about they're not designed for like like an ls1 or ls2 or ls3 to make big power on the big end they're designed for making more torque and pulling the truck around but i'll show you what happened on our first combination and i'm putting these in order of appearance so this first one is the big bang 5.3 liter twin turbo deal that i did for trucking magazine my first big bang was the 4-8 we thought it was a 5 3 i did that for hot rod after doing that and making over 1200 horsepower with the stock bottom end i decided i actually have to testify three because thinking that the 5.3 might be able to make more power at the same boost than the little 4-8 we put together a 5-3 but i wanted to put together a good combination that made decent power n a so that we didn't have to run a lot of boost on the combination to get to a big power level that would ultimately probably break a rod or a piston and here's the combination that we put together so you can see compared to stock it makes basically a lot more power we were able to exceed 500 horsepower 502 or 3 horsepower out here at 6 600 rpm peak torque checked in at 443 foot pounds at 5100 so we had shifted the torque peak a lot and you can see we've got our instead of the plateau that we see a lot of times we kind of have a a dual torque peak there because it made 300 or 438 foot pounds here at 46 or 700 rpm these things make good power and it's important to note remember all of these are with the stock bottom end so stock block crank rods pistons and the stock pistons are really what limits us from making even more power because there's no valve release we could put a lot more camshaft in this but let's go over what this combination was so again the stock bottom end and this is an lm7 so it was a dish piston it had trick flow 215 heads on it which are actually designed for a slightly bigger bore but they work very well on this combination we had a good sized camshaft in this and in this case it was a comp 281 lrr cam is the cathedral port version it's a 54-459-11 camshaft so a 617 624 lift split a 231 239 degree duration split at 113 degree lobe separation angle we use slightly longer push rods than this because of the trick flow heads we topped this with a fast lsxrt intake manifold and 102 millimeter throttle body for the n a combination we ran inch and three quarter headers with mufflers but the mufflers don't really change the power when we run it in fact they make more of a difference in low speed power because of the length of the collector extension but we almost always run a collector extension with the header when we run these things this thing made best power at about 29 degrees of total timing so again we have the stock bottom end lm7 dish piston so fairly low compression for the truck stuff the later gen 4 stuff has flat tops and it would make a little bit more power on this stock combination but we basically put heads cam and intake on the stock bottom end and if you put the right kind of camshaft in and good flowing heads and a good intake manifold this is how we get to the 500 horsepower level as you can see we did that here so now let's take a look at our next combination our second 500 horsepower stock bottom end 5.3 liter combination was actually the result of a big bang nitrous motor so much like the big bang turbo stuff what we were trying to find out is how much power you can make with the stock bottom end but instead of using the turbos to turn the boost all the way up we want to find out how much nitrous we can deploy and i'll go ahead and show you the result here is the result of that as you can see didn't turn out exactly like we wanted but we were able to make a powerful naturally aspirated combination because just like with the turbo stuff we wanted to start out with as much power as we could make with a stock bottom end kind of combination and then add lots of nitrous to that hoping to get to a big number like we were looking for maybe a thousand horsepower or something like that by adding 500 horsepower with the nitrous and you saw the results but here is the combination that we put together before adding the nitrous to it and we can compare that again to our stock motor 354 5 horsepower 381 foot-pounds here is the nitrous combination and you can see again it made over 500 horsepower 502 horsepower at 6 800 rpm and torque was nice and flat 408 or 9 foot pounds of torque again not nearly as and we'll compare all these at the end we'll compare the different 5.3 meter combinations you can see we lost power compared to the stock one down below 4500 rpm and most of that was because this particular combination utilized a holley high ram intake manifolds short so short runners pushing the power farther out in the rpm scale and losing power compared to the relatively long runner stuff on the fast manifold that we use but this combination was a powerful nonetheless again over 500 horsepower and it utilized a stock bottom end 5.3 gear lm7 so again the dish piston we had 30 to 32 000 ring gap in it we again had trick flow heads but we didn't use the 215 cnc heads the gen x heads we actually used the trick flow as cast 220 heads again more than enough flow to support this power level in fact they'll support closer to 600 horsepower than they will 500 according to the airflow but they were as cast and not cnc ported again we used the high ram and we used we used it in efi form and not with carburetors we did have two 4150 throttle bodies both of them flowing a thousand cfm so we had more than enough and we use those because we were using two plate nitrous setups on them again we used a big camshaft in this it was a btr stage four ls3 camshaft which was a six eighteen 596 lift split 233 to 250 degree duration at 50 and 113 plus 3 on the lsa again this was our baseline for the nitrous combination long tube headers we ran inch and seven eights headers on this combination and collector extensions again no accessories and an open throttle body our open throttle bodies two of them two 4150s so this big bang motor stock bottom end again made over 500 horsepower you can see it was kind of shifted more in the higher rpm scale because of that holley high ram but again over 500 horsepower did pretty well let's take a look at our next combination our final 5.3 liter combination was maybe the most interesting because it didn't utilize aftermarket cnc port or even the big 220 as gas cylinder heads from trick flow this was a strictly performance 5.3 and it's something that they supplied in the hopes that i could do a big bang with this motor again all these things seem to be big bang related but again this is our stock 5.3 354 55 381 foot-pounds but here is the strictly performance motor and you can see it did exceed 500 right at 500 501 in fact here i'll go ahead and show you when we put a radiused entry on the throttle body i'll go ahead and show you a photo of that we put a radius entry on it it kind of picked up power everywhere helped the airflow going in so we were up to 509 horsepower with this combination so it did very well peak torque checked in at 436 foot pounds again and like with the first combination we have a our kind of a dual torque peak out there and we made peak power out here at 67 or so and peak torque came at 5800 so it was doing pretty well but look down low we never made less than the stock combination and we loaded this thing at 3100 rpm so it was during doing well now this combination was interesting as i said because not because of what it had but more because of what it didn't have it didn't have the very expensive aftermarket cnc heads like the trick flow stuff airflow also makes good 205 heads tony mammal has some cool stuff there's lots of good stuff out there but this one again stock bottom end stock block crank rods pistons ring gap this one did have uh flat top pistons in it so not dish pistons like the lm7 it had flat top pistons like the gen 4 la l33 or lc9 um or or the 48 pistons basically and these are hard anodized so that to give them a little bit more strength for boosted applications because that's why they made this motor this motor was topped by a set of ported 706 heads and they weren't even full like cnc job that was a cnc porting but it had stock valve sizes it was kind of their low dollar porting that they offer from k-tech and so it obviously worked fairly well but i think of all the cylinder heads that we tested on these 500 horsepower combinations these heads probably flowed the less but as we see they performed very well now part of that is we had more compression because we had the flat top piston we also had a fairly good size cam shaft in this like the others this was a summit stage 4 cam which was a 625 605 lift split a 234 247 degree duration split and 113 plus three and a half on the camshaft we had inch and seven eight headers we did have collector extensions and mufflers we ran collector extensions on all the combinations we had a fast lsxr intake manifold and 102 millimeter throttle body which is why it makes such good torque compared to the other combination that had the holley manifold so again this is a good combination and it worked very well we ended up running this thing with a blower and turbos and all kinds of stuff because that's why that's what it was designed for but again easily over 500 horsepower plenty of torque and again the stock bottom end although this one started with the higher compression version so now let's compare all three and see what they look like okay guys i think we proved once and for all that yes it is definitely possible to exceed 500 horsepower flywheel with an otherwise stock bottom end 5.3 liter we did not once but three different times and we showed that all it takes is the right combination of cylinder heads camshaft and intake starting with a cylinder head you just need a cylinder head that will support that power level doesn't have enough airflow lucky for us there are lots and lots of good cylinder heads even for the small bore 5.3 that will allow us not only to make 500 horsepower but actually closer to 600 horsepower at least they have the airflow to support that the thing that limits us is camshaft there are lots of camshafts available but we don't have the piston of valve clearance available to us in a stock bottom end without valve reliefs to put enough camshaft in it to push power even further but there's enough room for us to put a big enough camshaft in it something in the low to mid 230 range at 50 with the available piston valve clearance to exceed 500 horsepower now on the intake side you need an intake manifold that will support that kind of power also allow us the right rpm range and as we saw choosing the fast manifold that's kind of the go-to thing for this combination of rpm and power but we saw that something like the short run or holley high ram will also make the peak power but you're just going to sacrifice power down low now the next question should be well how can i do this for like less money what is the low buck option for this can i make this kind of power by porting my own heads as we saw with this the ported 706 hits from k tech that's certainly possible i've seen guys do hand party on their own hits and had really good success you can put a bigger valve from the 799 or 243 head in the 706 head do your own porting and get very good airflow enough to support this power level now can i use like a sloppy stage 2 cam yes you can it's a low buck cam you could put that in and then substitute a trailblazer ss intake manifold for the fast you're never going to get to these power levels but you're going to make a lot of power i bet you're older make sure to like share subscribe ring the bell do all that stuff more testing coming up

Channel: Richard Holdener

Views: 210,884

Keywords: HOW TO MAKE LS HP, JUNKYARD LS HP, ALL MOTOR POWER, HEADS, CAM & INTAKE, 5.3L LM7, LS PERFORMANCE

Id: yd2weTpjK54

Length: 15min 28sec (928 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 22 2021