Small Block Fords Explained

[Music] hey thanks for stopping by pete snake by kit again today uh today's video what we're going to do we're going to try and take some of the mist and the mystery out of 40 engines i'm going to do this in two segments one's going to be small block ford one will be big block ford one of my friends mentioned on this that uh i was throwing around these ford acronym engine names and so on and not everybody um you know knows what they are so since i'm trying to help you understand this whole cobra thing and maybe make some choices about the one you want to build let's clarify some of this stuff so we'll start with the little ones the small blocks so there's four different ones there's the aftermarket hybrid we'll talk about but let's start here these are the deck heights of the two small blocks that we'll call windsors that has nothing to do with the royal family by the way before you ask anyway it's a v8 engine as you know and the taller the deck height is the bigger the engine so this is what if you've ever seen a 5.0 mustang we all have it has an 8.2 deck height engine the bigger one be a 351 these are usually just called a windsor now a number of derivatives of this one so the 260 that's what carol shelby got from lee iacocca in that famous meeting when he said i can build you some car for 25 000 bucks get out of here before you bite somebody that one he got uh two or three 260 engines they didn't use very many i think they built 50 or less of the small block cobras with 260s they quickly moved up to the big 289 back in the 60s and 70s uh cubic inches were king a relatively small engine but it was a small car 67 that engine grew to a 302 and so on this thing's been around for a long time made in the early 60s uh my 1996 f-150s got one of those in so anyhoo you can make these bigger we've all heard the term stroker motor right where it's got a longer crank uh to make the displacement bigger or maybe boring them out bigger you can only go so big on the original blocks it starts off as a four inch on these guys and you can burn 30 or 40 over get risky at 60. but if you use an aftermarket block this cylinder hole can be bored bigger because they got a lot more meat and potatoes in there to allow for that so with the stroker kits you can build a 331 you can build a 347 you can go to 366 363 366 whatever it is that's a pretty big engine when you consider it started off here it's got an extra hundred inches on it uh but this one would be an aftermarket block to get that big these guys you can build one out of a 302 fairly cheaply buy a kit from summit and have a thing board or you know get the block done in a machine shop so you can make some pretty good power with these uh without a good strong aftermarket block you're not going to safely make 600 horsepower you could do it with some power adders but i guess they split apart and things happen that are bad okay the 351 windsor they had some derivatives of it but for the most part they just made it 351. the popular strokers on this one i've seen three 393's i've seen 408s [Music] 427 is possible with the stock block most of those are an aftermarket block and they even do a 4 54 definitely an aftermarket block with that one and you can imagine it's not a whole lot bigger than this guy right and have something as big as a big block chevy and looks way better uh you can really make a bunch of power with that so that's kind of fun 351 cleveland this also had a bunch of different odd things we won't talk about other engine sizes for trucks and whatever but the main thing was 351 cleveland what it was famous for is having a big big intake port it looks like a small version of a big block chevy uh their rectangle port deal they flow a lot of air probably too much for most street applications unless they have a lot of compression and and honestly the modern cylinder heads you would buy an aluminum version of that they take the intake port and they shrink it down a little bit to uh put some velocity in the port and not just having air stumbling around in there uh this one made a lot of horsepower though uh i had one of those in my 70 boston 2 that went pretty well until it went like that made a big noise and flames came out through the shaker hood scoop and it was done but it uh you can make power with these things these are getting hard to find the blocks are getting hard to find the cast iron cylinder heads you would spend two or three times what you would spend for a really nice set of aluminum heads i don't think anybody's even doing uh doing that so as far as factory engines or the hybrid in here where they took a 302 block a 351 cylinder head and you made a thing called a boss 302 69 and 70 they came in the real boss 302 mustangs not the ones they make now those are cool too but a box 302 is a hybrid between this little short deck and gigantic cylinder head uh i beat on that one pretty hard for a while uh late 70s i built a pretty leaned on combination of that had a big flat tappet or a big solid roller cam a lot of compression uh 8 500 rpm it went it was pretty fast i didn't stay together very long i never even was able to make a clean pass at the drag strip it had the roller cam wanted to come apart and come out of the car and stuff and it was a real bummer but the moments it went i mean seriously it probably made i don't know whatever maybe 400 horsepower for back then which was pretty good a little tiny motor um interesting note i said it's got a 351 cleveland head on it and it's a little engine i worked at a place years ago advanced engineering west hi chris um had a flow bench there and uh mark and i my buddy that i worked with we've you know there's a formula that uh superflow has on uh cylinder flow and rpm efficiency and all this stuff so long story short what we figured out is the optimum rpm for the boss 302 with the heads i had on it the exhaust reported the intakes were stock was 18 000 rpm that's not going to happen on one of these i mean 8500 is pushing the structural limits of one of these things so needless to say way more cylinder head than it needed so um these things were fun but a little bit crazy they built these for trans am and did real well with them now there's an aftermarket hybrid that's kind of cool too you take a 351 windsor block and a cleveland cylinder head and you have a cleavoir i think that's how they spell it it's a made up word anyway so it doesn't matter anyway they take a you can use a block from a fairly reasonably attainable uh 351 windsor stock block or an aftermarket one if you want you can buy a fairly reasonable set of after market aluminum cylinder heads to put them together you've got a strong bottom and you have a great cylinder head somebody makes a hybrid intake manifold to make all that happen and i've seen some big power numbers on on dinos for those i hadn't seen one in a car i think it would be neat to see hopefully that de-mist this uh the small block board thing oh the other thing i want to mention about that these are 60s uh 70 early 70 engines as far as hot rodding goes this is what hot rodders want to build that they're building a an era correct car right uh we guys like me that want to build a cobra they want something that kind of maybe should have been in there right in that in that time span these are the only ones these two of all of these that were ever in a cobra because then they went to the big 427 motor however this is when carol shelby wanted i'll tell you why i think that i don't know that for sure but he alluded to that in an old interview i saw the other day is that when chevrolet corvettes were starting to catch up with the small block cobras it's because they'd come out with a 327 and probably had just gotten a hold of the 350 which was much bigger than their 283 and stuff and they were starting to to catch up and he really wanted something in that displacement range ford didn't have it you had to go from this featherweight engine to hitting the thing with a sledgehammer with the 427 and we'll talk about that more in the big block uh one that i do but this didn't come out till 1969 carol shelby and ford were kind of done at that point they're for sure they were making no cobras so that would never happen i believe that if this thing would have been around in 1964 there wouldn't have been a big block cobra there had been a small block cobra that went faster and had a bigger motor wouldn't be this crazy as a 427 so hope that takes uh some mystery out of it put some facts with it if you have questions about these put us in the comments and i get enough of them why don't i do a a video on what you're actually interested in i will try that until then stay safe look for the big block ford explained video that will come out this week sometime hey thanks for watching take care

Channel: Pete's Snake Bite Kit

Views: 982

Rating: 4.8048782 out of 5

Keywords: Small Block Ford, SBF 347, SBF 331, Boss 302, 351 Cleveland, Boss 351, 260 Ford, 289 Ford, Shelby Cobra, Ac Cobra, shelby cobra, muscle car

Id: h_OK-G-maiI

Length: 10min 16sec (616 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020