07/16/06

If you are a true hot rodder, then you crave horsepower.  You probably also tend to read as many car mags as you can get your hands on.  If this is the case, then you must know about the Popular Hot Rodding Engine Masters Challenge.  We were fortunate enough to be one of the few teams selected to participate in this years Challenge.  The goal is to make as much torque and horsepower between 2500 and 6500rpm as possible with a 434 cubic inch engine running on pump gas.  The specifics are on the Engine Masters website.  Their site also contains regular updates so check it out often.

Our goal is to win this contest of power.  Our competition is fierce and legendary.  Names like Jon Kaase, Bischoff Engine Service, Dick Miller Racing and my alma mater, the School of Automotive Machinists will be giving it their all.  More than just pride is on the line.  Thousands of dollars will be spent on each entry in hopes of getting part of the over $100,000 purse.

Our plan is to to build a 434 inch small block Ford.  We will be using a Ford Motorsports SVO windsor style block and a set of the Jegs/Kaase canted valve heads.  We have already acquired a number of the parts we need including the block, an Eagle 4340 crank, Carillo rods, The Jegs/Kaase heads and a number of other small parts.  Naturally we can't divulge all of our secrets until after the competition but we can tell you that besides the usual low-friction rings, high tech coatings, head porting and super-neato pistons, we have a few other tricks up our sleeves.  Just wait and see.

Based off of a number of hours on Performance Trends' Engine Analyzer as well as some good guesstimation, we figure we need somewhere around 700hp and 650ft-lbs of torque peak and average about 500hp and 575 ft-lbs across the range.  That would give us a score of 1075.  We hope that we can back up those numbers and that they will be good enough for the win.

09/14/06

We are nearing the deadline for completion of our engine and are just waiting on a few final parts before hitting the dyno.  We have found most of the sponsor companies to be very gracious in helping us out with advice and quality parts at reasonable prices.  In just over 3 weeks we will have the results of this competition and will publish the specs of our engine in every detail after that.  Until then you can take a peek at our early mock up pictures and use your imagination...

10/11/06

After months of planning and many sleepless nights, we are done.  The Challenge is over.  Did we win? No.  Did we blow up? No.  We ended up right in the middle of the pack. 

The story of the Challenge is like any other saga.  On Sunday night the week before the competition all of our thrashing paid off as we were able to finally get the engine running and broken in on our run in stand.

The next day we mounted the engine on a Superflow 901 Dyno and set about the tuning process.  We started out with 34 degrees of timing and a modest 83/83 jetting on a Holley 950HP carb.  It turns out the engine needs very little timing for best power and we ended up running only 27 degrees of total timing.  This is due primarily to a very efficient combustion chamber and a matching inverted dome piston made by CP pistons coated with Tech Line Coatings' CBX coating.

The Total Seal gapless top rings sealed up extremely well.  In fact, with the spark plugs in place it is almost impossible to turn over with a breaker bar.  Without the plugs it turns over with less than 40 ft-lbs completely assembled.  On the Superflow Dyno, the torque curve was flat as a pancake but a little lower than we had hoped.  We tried different carb spacers, carb jetting and cam timing and came up with a estimated 994 points by adding up average torque plus average horsepower.  We made almost exactly the same power with a 1050 Dominator and the 950HP 4150 carb but the Dominator had adjustable air bleeds that we could flatten the fuel curve out with so that was our final choice.  The main problem we had was the dyno would only pull down to 3100 and not the 2500 that the DTS would pull down to in competition.  Knowing this, we figured our true numbers would be in the 975-985 range.

After the Monday night dyno session we boxed the engine up and shipped it out to Long Island, New York the next morning.  We fretted about everything.  Did we have all of the exhaust pieces we needed?  Did we include all of our tuning gear?  Would the engine arrive by the Thursday deadline?  There was nothing else we could do at this point but wait.

On Saturday morning, Shannon and I packed up and started on the 16 hour drive to New York.  We drove straight through and arrived a 2am local time.  We weren't supposed to check in to our hotel until 3 PM Sunday but they managed to find a room for us.  Thank goodness.  We were not in the mood to spend any more time in the truck.  We woke up and got in the truck to head out to breakfast when we were halted by the our truck not starting.  Not a good omen.  We cranked it over and it had fuel pressure but the tach wasn't moving.  We figured it was a crank position sensor and after a towing bill, 3 hours at Firestone and $300 dollars later it turns out we had diagnosed it correctly and could have fixed it for about $75 and 5 minutes.  What can you do?  Pay the man.

We headed over to the World Products/Bill Mitchell Hardcore facility to check out the situation there and were pleased to meet a great bunch of people.  They had plenty of dyno carts so we went ahead and set our engine up since we were scheduled to run Monday at 12:15PM.  The way that their exhaust system in the dyno room is set up, we actually had to cut almost 5 inches off of our header collectors to make them fit with the mufflers.  Unfortunately our O2 sensor bungs were in this 5 inches and that turned out to be a major problem during the tuning phase later on.

Monday morning we arrived early and the first competitor scheduled did not show so we got bumped up into the number one slot.  We we as ready as we could be so we said OK and wheeled our engine in and hooked it up.  Tech inspector Wesley went over a checklist of requirements and we poured in 6 quarts of Royal Purple 11 and fired it up.  As Steve Dulcich commented, the engine was remarkably docile at idle.  In fact at times the dyno operator had it idling at 700rpm.  We made an initial jetting change using the Holley Adjust-A-Jet (that I HIGHLY recommend) and made three warm up pulls.  It sounded great.  Wes pointed out the format of the data on the dyno sheets and we then had 5 minutes to look the sheets over and 20 minutes to make as many changes and pulls as we wanted to.  Unfortunately, the numbers we were tuning off of were the raw torque and corrected torque, not corrected torque and corrected horsepower.  This skewed our tuning as we never looked at the horsepower numbers.  We made a few jetting changes and got where we thought was our best total score then made our three scored pulls.  We were ecstatic when the dyno sheets printed out and Wes added them up.  We signed off on the numbers and they were posted as a score of 1032.  In the middle of taking our engine off the dyno, we were approached by one of the officials and told that they made a mistake when telling us to look at the wrong scoring numbers (Raw and corrected torque).  Instead of a 506 / 526 torque and horsepower averages, we actually had 526 / 452 averages.  We we crushed.  It also didn't help that we made the scored pulls immediately after the tuning pulls.  The remaining heat in the engine dropped our power slightly and cost us a few points.  Our final tuning pull looked like this.

As you can see it made a ton of bottom end and mid range power and kind of fell off at the top.  We felt that this was due to some pretty major rocker stud deflection and vibration from the .775 lift cam.  Jegs didn't have a stud girdle available when we were building the engine but in talking with Jon Kaase last week he says he has some in stock.  We will install the girdle before passing the engine along to the customer. 

Looking at the dyno sheet again, the BSFC (Brake Specific Fuel Consumption) numbers appear to vary greatly.  They should be stable around .440-.460 throughout the entire range as they were on the Superflow Dyno.  We can only attribute this to the way the DTS is set up with the fuel flow meter before the pressure regulator.  We would have liked to have our O2 sesor hooked up to compare the numbers.

After all was said and done, we ended up in 17th place.  It was a little lower than we had hoped but a great learning experience and a good time nonetheless.  We made good friends, had lots of fun and didn't blow up.  We would like the thank the gang at Primedia / Popular Hot Rodding / Engine Masters and the people at World Products / Bill Mitchell Hardcore for putting on a great event.  We look forward to attending next year and improving our standing. 

Our final engine combination started out with a pair of Jegs/Kaase canted valve Ford Winsor heads, Ferrea custom 2.100/1.625 valves, Manley 221440P Nextec springs with 255/600 pressure, Manley titanium retainers, Crane Gold 1.7 rocker arms, Crower 210 ball 9.250 long pushrods, Crane solid roller lifters, Comp Cams 246/257 solid roller cam with .775/.715 lift on a 110 lobe separation with the intake centerline at 103 spun by a Jesel belt drive system.  The bottom end used a SVO block bored to 4.030".  We used a Probe crank and had Bullet Cams grind the rod journals down to 1.850" for use with the Carillo 6.200 rods.  On the front of the crank was a TCI Rattler balancer and on the back was a Performance Racing Warehouse flywheel.  The pistons were custom CP pieces that we coated with Tech Line Coatings CBX and used Total Seal Gapless .043 / 1.5mm / 3mm rings.  The wrist pins were .866" x 2.5" and were casidium coated.  We used a Melling M-Select oil pump, PurePower! oil filter, Royal Purle 11 oil, Oil Extreme oil additive, Canton Fox Body Winsor oil pan, windage tray and main girdle with ARP fasteners.  It was topped off with an Edelbrock Super Victor intake manifold coated with a thermal barrier on the bottom and a thermal dispersant on top.  We had a Wilson Manifolds carb adaptor to mount the Holley 1050 Dominator set up with the Holley Adjust-A-Jets and a K&N air filter.  For ignition, we hooked up an MSD Pro Billet distributor to an MSD HVC coil powered by an MSD programmable Digital 7 ignition box.  The Hedman headers were stepped 1 7/8 to 2 inch and were designed for a 65-70 Mustang.  They were coated with Nitroplate coating that kept the temperature down so well that we were able to hold the headers with our bare hands less than two minutes after our final dyno pull.

Thanks to all of these manufacturers for their help and support and to the many other people not listed without whom we could not have finished this project.  Below is the car that this engine will be powering...

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This site was last updated 12/26/07