1000HP With No Turbo, No Blower and No Nitrous: Finnegan's Garage Ep.79

Welcome back to Finnegan's Garage, today is a monumental occasion because almost two years ago Beau Spears and I introduced you to what would eventually become this big block Chevy in a video. I think it was in episode 24 where we talked about different weights between cast iron and aluminum cylinders. heads and engine blocks and at the time I said I was going to build a 598 cubic inch big block Chevy using a Brody clock and product heads and then I would eventually show it to you, it's not a 598 anymore, we actually made it smaller . for a couple of reasons and it's your home right now but this is finally done it's ready to go on the dyno and in this video we're going to talk about what the parts and pieces are and also how to stab a new dealer on a completely new engine new goes over the basics here, which is a product standard deck aluminum engine block, it is based on the old school brand 4 454 and has a standard deck height of 9.8 0 inches which is measured from the center line of the crank to the surface of the platform. here you have a 55 millimeter cam tunnel that allows you to put a big camshaft here with roller bearings you have a billet crankshaft Lunati you have CP Carrillo pistons that look a lot like these they are giants they are for 700 diameter this is how the engine of

turbo

ship, the ones on this engine are 600 diameter and also quite large and I mentioned before that it is no longer a 598, once we did the math I really wasn't comfortable with the piston design that would have been the result of to make a big stroke short deck engine, the stroke for this was originally going to be four and a half inches and when you do that with a short deck and a long rod, you end up with a piston that has a really short compression height, a wrist pin that ends in the oil ring, which isn't the end of the world, but the top of the piston ends up being very thin and I wasn't comfortable with that, so we shortened the stroke on this engine so it has a four 600 bore, but it's a 375 inch four point stroke and when you do that you can put a six point five three five inch rod in here and end up with a stronger piston at the end of the day, so it has bullet connecting rods CP Lunati Crankshaft Rod The Bullet Series is a commercially available rod made from the same forgings as the Carillo x custom racing rods.

It's a really nice part, but you can call and get standard links off the shelf the same day, basically the pistons are custom just like we made it. before it was topped with Braddock's conventional sr20 cylinder heads, now these are a 20 degree valve angle cylinder head with a raised 440cc intake that through two 400 valves flows over 500 CFM of air . It's amazing that on the exhaust side 335. CFM flows through a 1.80 inch exhaust valve. This is next level conventional head technology. It is not an extended port header. It does not have push rods of three different lengths. It doesn't need a ton of weird stuff to make it work like some of the older ones. quote unquote pro stock cylinder heads that not everyone has been using for the last 10 or 15 years, really excited to see what this does.

I'm guessing we probably have around 900 naturally aspirated horsepower now with forty thousand. seven interested Kemetic MLS gaskets and these cylinder heads and these pistons with zero clearance, meaning they're flush with the top of the deck surface. This has a compression ratio of thirteen and a half to one. The engine owner doesn't mind using race fuel. He goes in his boat, buys it by the drum, so it will probably run on 110 octane race fuel and last for many years. It has a medium to large mullet solid roller camshaft. It has approximately 800 mils of elevation. on the exhaust side with a 1:7 rocker arm it has 880 mil lift on the intake side with a 1:7 rocker arm the heads are filled with Jezza's best aluminum shaft rockers weak but we have 903 Really nice bar risers and valves on this Manley thing, it's just a great piece and it's topped off with Hollie's new gen 3 Dominator cars.

This is an all aluminum carburetor with billet parts throughout, it's 5/16 of an inch taller than the stock Dominator and what that does. Did you allow Holley to make the x' venturi have a larger radius, a larger transition and when you do that you get more airflow? You can order one of these up to 1475 CFM of airflow, which is just Nana's for a carburetor and as a result of that, they had to make the fuel containers 20% larger to be able to handle all that flow. of additional air. Now this one has thirteen hundred and fifty more CFM than this engine and we're about to ship it to California, out west. technical performance my friend Steve Relays has some tricks for making a three-circuit Holley Dominator run really well at part throttle, so he'll be the one to test and tune this engine on the dyno and hopefully get it out your iPhone to me and it will shoot a little. video of that and yes this thing is going to be a beast my friend is going to love it and I can't wait to see the numbers so we've talked before about how to install a distributor in an engine for the pit floor and pit truck ramp.

It comes to mind, you know we talked about how to find TDC and all that, but what we haven't talked about is how to install a distributor to ensure that the gear meshes correctly with not only the camshaft but also the drive. of the oil pump. it's at the bottom of the gear it's engaged correctly with the lever inside the motor it turns and turns and turns so let's do it right now this is an interesting distributor okay this is an MSD part number eight five five zero five, this is an adjustable sliding collar distributor see this collar here, it slides on and then with set screws you can adjust the height of the distributor on the engine block.

This is very useful because not all motors are standard and not all motors have a constant deck height. Not all intake manifolds are the same, this gives you the ability to ensure that this gear meshes perfectly with not only the gear on the back of the camshaft but also the oil pump drive shaft. Another interesting thing about this distributor is that it does not have a built-in ignition timing advance mechanism. If you look closely, you will see a reluctor wheel and nothing else there. If I hold the bottom of this tributary and try to turn the rotor nothing happens, so what that means is that it needs to be installed on the engine with the total ignition timing in mind, so let's say for round numbers we wanted 40 degrees of ignition timing here, we would put it in and set it to 40 degrees and adjust it, then rely on a programmable ignition box to timing whatever amount we wanted at various points on the RPM curve, so it's backwards.

Don't set this at 10 degrees initially and then have a certificate or vacuum advance system. By increasing the sync, you increase the sync to the maximum with this. immediately and then use an ignition box that is programmable with a laptop to sync the timing at various times, say when the

nitrous

is on or at part throttle or you know, idle, whatever, so what we're going to do now is to cover the gear. In some fat, we'll let it drop there until it hits the bottom. Once it bottoms out, we'll lift it ten thousandths of an inch, tighten our slip collar onto our base joint, and then take other measurements to determine. the correct depth for this to mesh the oil pump drive shaft as you can see our collar is on now we're going to put our base gasket on and you want to do these things before you put grease on the gear otherwise you'll just I'm going to make a mess, okay, base gaskets on the collars, now we're going to install it so we're all the way down and we have the wrong distributor because this is for a small deck engine.

Wow, as you can see, there's our clamp. Okay, so this is meant to be attached to this area, but this is a standard bed height Chevrolet engine. Okay, so 9800 inches, a high deck engine is 10200 inches, measured from the centerline to the front of the crank and to the surface of the deck here. So as the engine gets taller, you need a taller distributor. This is the distributor for a high deck engine, not a standard deck engine, so our options here are to neither get the right distributor nor make a spacer for that thing to sit on because Right now, if I put it in where it should be, it can't be clamped here, so it's no good, let's order another one and then we'll do this again.

Let's try this again with descriptor number eight 5505 of the correct part. We have already shown you on the left eight five seven oh three significant differences in these here, well, the one on the right, obviously longer for a high Dec engine than the one on the left, the one on the left also has a cover shorter distributor and this one does not have the brass gear, the key here when correctly selecting distributor gears is to make sure this material is softer than the material the camshaft gear is made of. Well, that's the important part. Let's try this again.

Well, real quick, what is it for those? The rings seal this at the top of the cam and therefore if they are missing in certain applications the oil will not flow around these and will go down the main gallery for all lifters but some blocks do not have enough clearance for these O rings. They go in these two slots when you end up putting the distributor in and it will cut the o-ring or you will never be able to get the distributor out. O-rings are important, we can make sure they will actually work with your application.

We're going to remove the cover that way you can grab the rotor and make sure it's actually locked on a slow engine. It looks like it's all the way down, so what you do is you just slide the sliding collar down and then you want. to raise it again about 10 to 30 thousandths of an inch now, when you grab those fiber grips, move it down twenty thousand twenty thousand feeler gauge should get you closer to mom, we've cleaned the excess grease out of there, stab the distributor turned. We turn it three times and now when we turn it, it looks like we have a pattern near the middle, if not a little low, on the gear, but it definitely worked and now that we have this set up, the other measurement.

What we are going to do now is check the engagement of the bottom of the gear on the top of the oil pump drive rod and to do that we need to know the distance from the base of the joint to here and then we need to know the distance from here to the top of the dryer rod, subtract those two things, much like setting up a clutch bearing and that's your compromise, so if you guys at home don't have auto dial calipers, we'll be going. to use a ruler for this and it looks like we're there, so six and five eighths, that's what I'm getting up to here, it's seven and a quarter, okay, so let's do the math, here's our right sliding collar spark of the intake manifold. plug the terminals up, okay, Charita comes all the way here, then you take that gear and we're here, you should be mated with our oil pump pushrod, so what our dimensions told us were from the intake manifold to the top of our drive rod which was six and 5/8 and then from our slip collar which is also on our intake manifold to the bottom of the gear 7 and 1/4 inches which means we have engagement obviously not we were able to turn the rotor, but we have more than half an inch of compromise, they are closer to 3/4, which is enough, so this will connect this turn, our rotor, all will be right with the world, friend, you must be an artist , red, even makes sense, anyway, movie. perfect, I have sloppy handwriting, do whatever as long as you get the point.

I mean, we're not using hgih everywhere, but whatever it is, it's basically the same thing now that we know we have the proper gear mesh and the proper coupling on our oil pump driveshaft. I'm going to remove the white lithium grease from the gear and use the supplied Lucas Oil Racing Performance Gear break-in and protection lubricant. I'm going to generously cover that thing to make sure it doesn't wear out during filming. Put this in the stall, some spark plugs, some eight and a half millimeter MSD spark plug wires and ship this to California so Steve Brule can make some beautiful noises.

The danger is that you go through all this work. Put this on and thenyou discover the distributor. It doesn't fit in the engine block because the engine block wasn't free enough for it and they take it out and then start over. I hope these don't stay down there, let's try. Anyway, pull up our plug, turn the plug on and then be my shorts. We've set our Ati balancer at 35 degrees before top dead center, that's a guess as to how this engine will like timing wise and now we're going to try to do that. Stab the attribute and line up a hole in no way, yeah, and line up the rotor with the number one, they're very close, so there it is, it's pointing at the number one.

Now we can rotate the casing. Get one of the reluctors lined up. Put the lid on. on the spark plug wires and this is ready to go to the dyno. Wow, yeah, that was easy, so the O-rings worked. Oh, it sounds worse.