Murf if you get feeling overwhelmed by to many projects talk to me, I can make you feel better!
A silver and red tee top T/A for a high school ride. That is Awesome!
For thoughts on what is normal and to much for compression with iron heads and how much power you “should” push the 500557’s too, I think what you said is generally very CORRECT!
I did a bunch of stuff to this engine too prepare it for the power and the compression. Give me some time and I will detail some of that. My brother and I both have engineering degree’s in machine design. I have an Agricultural Engineering degree, similar to a Mechanical Engineering degree for machine design. There is usually (not always, sometimes I am just flat nut’s
) some reasoning to the madness.
Our high compression pump gas ventures started back when we turbo charged one of our cars in the 1990’s. We were running that cuda drag car , and had a turbo charged street engine in another car. We started to contemplate that if we could run an effective boosted compression of nearly 12:1 on pump gas, then why was it not possible to do that N/A? We started looking at what makes each engine different for how it reacts to pump gas.
Probably one of my best example’s for what is possible for compression is our 69 Dodge Charger, which has a 510 CID engine with iron heads. A TON of people struggle to run 91 octane with mid 9s compression with 440s, open chamber heads, no quench at all, pistons way down in the deck, fast rate cams, tons of different issues. Big cid’s with the same component’s as smaller cid’s generally make some of that worse. In theory that 510, which is based off of a 440, should not be super friendly for pump gas. Our engine is 10.5 SCR and we run it on 87 octane, it is roughly 550 HP. It isn’t like it “barely” works either. It has full timing, doesn’t ping anywhere ever, we shift at 6000-6200 rpm. We built it more than 20 years ago, I drove it to town last night. It is a blast. Basically we took some of what we were doing with other makes for boost and high compression, and started applying it to Pontiac’s. It isn’t just one thing, it is a bunch of things.
I do like the firethorn red. My son thought it was Kool. This photo was back when I just brought the car home for the first time