The Best LS Engine To Build For Horsepower

hi everyone and in this video I'll be talking about which Ellis engine to get for your application and bolting on the horsepower hi everyone and welcome to the channel about building kick cars and other topics if you like what you see please subscribe and hit the notification buttons below and share with others on social media so I recently got a surprise when I took my 6 liter block to the machine shop to get worked on it turns out it was bored 30 over and it was in great shape I just needed a new home to crosshatch it I thought I should make this video about LS engines and the horsepower you could bolt on because there is one point that I kind of missed as I was researching how to build horsepower into an LS now it was common sense for me to know that a six liter engine is going to have more horsepower than a 5.3 liter engine I got that that's a no-brainer then bolting on a bigger intake and adding a cam and such will bring more horsepower got that no-brainer but here's the one thing I never got until I reread through some of the information recently and maybe it's because I was just overloaded with tons of new information and I really couldn't see through the forest those aftermarket editions do not add the same amount of horsepower to every engine it varies just like some combinations of aftermarket parts do not bring any advantages on their own unless they are both added so I started looking at different engine build case studies specifically LS and was dumbfounded with the no movement of horsepower on smaller engines think of it like a multiplier the smaller the chamber size of the engine the smaller the multiplication of capabilities of horsepower gains will be and the bigger the chamber size the more multiplication factor will be it's not necessarily linear or it seems like it's not linear but it probably exactly is for example if I have a 5.7 LS engine and I add a fast intake on it at 4000 rpms I get a gain of 1 horsepower compared to the stock ls6 intake now that fast intake and fast as a brand if he didn't know is $1,000 now if you're at 6,000 rpms you might gain 7 to 10 horsepower but I'm on the streets and I'm not drag racing around so I'm never really going to be in that range for more than two seconds and I'm in the thousand to four thousand range all day long so spending a thousand dollars on a one horsepower boost to me is kind of asinine and silly and kind of ignorant a sense of not knowing what you're doing and this information is not anywhere on the internet that I found without digging somewhere really really deep there's all these you know shootouts between intakes and different things like that and it's all already pimped out engines nothing on stock engines so when you're seeing all those reviews if Holly's things got you know fifty seventy-five more horsepower and you add on this intake well that's on a hot rodded engine already when you add that intake to a stock engine you're getting minimal gains that really isn't worth the money now for a second example with the same exact stock engine if we add in a hotter cam at 4,000 rpms we'll get a 20 horsepower boost now that is only 500 or less for the cam and across the full range add ported heads with the cam and we only add another four horsepower that's not enough horsepower in my operating range and heads are not cheap possibly thousands of dollars but this same combination at 6,000 rpms yields 22 with just the cam and with both a total of 73 horsepower now that's definitely noticeable but how often are you going to be at that range peeking out so now imagine this was a 5.3 liter engine the fast intake would virtually do nothing and the cam and heads would be a significant percentage smaller and gains and yet you spent three four thousand dollars now if we want to talk about superchargers on a 6.0 liter engine at 4,000 rpms it will add a hundred and five horsepower and at 5800 rpm about a hundred and eighty five horsepower if it was a 5.3 liter engine you're not going to see those numbers with turbo which is the most significant boost on a 4.8 liter engine compared to a 6.0 liter engine is really interesting let's use high rpm since that's where turbos work the best so we're going to read at 50 100 rpms with an eight pound boost on the turbo so a stock 6.0 litre engine is about 337 horsepower when it's boosted that 6.0 liter is 746 horsepower now a boosted 4.8 liter engine is 542 horsepower that's over a 200 horsepower difference between the engines now you might be saying well of course the engines way smaller well yes the combustion chamber is way smaller but the outside is exactly the same the weight is possibly the same or even for the smaller engines heavier because they're not as bored out the LS engines are all basically the same on the outside and it's just the chamber size that is changing on the inside so if you're getting a junkyard engine and it's a 5.3 liter and it's $1,000 and a 6.0 liter is $1,300 it's worth getting the 6.0 if you're going for horsepower cuz there'll be a significant gain due to the size of the chamber when you add on aftermarket parts now let's factor in one other thing horsepower effectiveness is all based off the average weight of a vehicle which is for the most part around 3,500 to 4,000 pounds this excludes big trucks so for simple math we'll say 4,000 so if you have a 300 horsepower engine in a 4,000 pound car and you take the same engine and put it in a 2,000 pound car it will feel like you doubled your horsepower because it does not have to drag all this weight around basically like putting a 600 horsepower engine in your original 4,000 pound car so when selecting an engine I would look at what is the application how heavy will the car be and then what your budget is and then you have to do the research for what is realistic gains for the money you want to spend and so if I take a bone stock vortech LS engine out of a truck and throw it into a two thousand pound kit car we are talking anywhere between 285 to 325 horsepower this car will probably be faster than most cars on the road and I didn't spend a diamond modification at that point you just want to make it look pretty and if you're gonna have an exposed engine you're gonna want to paint it and change that truck intake otherwise you can leave it as is and keep it covered up hopefully this gave you some realistic boundaries of what these engines can do and how different the add-ons affect different applications if you've not seen any my other videos on rebuilding an LS engine please check out my channel which will give you a lot more insight on cost and the results until next time please hit the subscribe and notification buttons and have a great day [Music]

Channel: Street Rod Jim

Views: 302,199

Keywords: Street Rod Jim, building a kit car from scratch, building a kit car with no experience, Building a kit car step by step, Building a Factory Five 33 Hot Rod, Factory Five Build, best engine to rebuild for beginners, Rebuilding a LQ4 6.0 L Engine, ls engine, LS Engine Swap, ls engine build, ls engine rebuild, ls engine junkyard, ls engine junkyard guide, Junkyard ls, Vortec, Gen III, LS1, LS2, LS3, LS6, LS4, LSA, LS9, LS7, LQ4, LQ9, LM7, LM33, LM4, LR4, ls motor junkyard, bolt on horsepower

Id: B2DwzEY2f1w

Length: 8min 28sec (508 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 05 2019