5000

For someone obsessed with cars, and more specifically car engines, there really isn't a greater feeling of accomplishment than seeing a Chevy 350 V8 engine that was taken apart, measured, and put back together by your very own hands run successfully. At school I am in the class I have been waiting to take forever. It's called Hot Rod. It's actually 2 classes long. In the first class we take apart and measure EVERYTHING in our engines and then put it back together. In the second class we put that engine in a T-Bucket and hook it all up. We run the engines we built on a dyno to see how much horsepower we make with them. Then we put modifications on our engine to try and gain more horsepower. The ultimate goal is to achieve more than 340 horses. If we accomplish that we get to put NOS in out engine for one final run on the dyno.

Our first pass on the dyno with our stock engine got us 195 horsepower, which is really weak, and 278 torque, which is really good. I was pretty dissapointed in our weak horespower rating. We then pulled the camshaft out and replaced it with one that had more life, more duration, and more overlap. Thus producing more power. We also put rocker arms that are bigger than our stock ones. The stock rocker arms have a ratio of 1.5:1, the ones we installed have a ratio of 1.6:1.

On our second run on the dyno with the mods we installed we pulled 245 horses, and still 278 torque. Thats really impressive. We gained about 50 horsepower with few modifications to the wheels. That means that with drivetrain lose taken into account we gained about 70 horsepower at the crank. Again thats very impressive for what we did.

There is nothing quite like the feeling of seeing the engine you built turn over 5000 RPM. For me thats something to be proud of. More modifications are yet to come, and thus more horsepower. We will soon put bigger heads, a better intake manifold, and a bigger carburetor and another bigger cam, I think. I think we will be able to get NOS in the end of the class.

Updates will come on the same topic.