I think I bought my first Ultradyne cam about 30 years ago. Good stuff. My all time favorite is the R60 lobe. 259 at 050 with .434 lobe lift and 290 advertised duration. That intake lobe runs nice and smooth but makes a ton of power in a 400+ inch engine. Works fine on the street or in a drag car. I have that lobe in the 470 inch Mopar in my Duster. Idles okay for street use but makes 650 to 680 hp in a pump gas engine.

Its really not so much what the factor "is" as the apparent fact that their is something "different".


Despite best efforts, most every small shop dyno installation has some variables that have to be accommodated for.  As an example, mine has a 90 degree turn in the exhaust behind the water tower, and the pipes then travel sideways through the cell to reach an outside wall, where they have another 90 degree bend and a pair of semi-truck mufflers and +/- 15 feet of vertical tubing to exit.  Installations in more of a rural area might just poke straight out the back wall with zero restriction and no mufflers at all. 

Being in Detroit, where the outside air temps are below freezing half the year, my installation breaths "shop air" (I crack an outside door during pulls) instead of running outside air.  Breathing 15 degree temp outside air would not be realistic for any performance engine.  Even with correction factors in play I see some clear variances when testing in August versus December....doubtless the reason that high dollar OE and NASCAR installations are controlled atmospherics as well.

Sounds like your exhaust might be compromised a bit. The dyno cell where I test does a lot of SBC circle track engines. These are usually 420 inch engines with high compression, solid rollers and good heads that make 700 to 750 hp. By changing the way the exhaust system was routed we were able to gain about 20 hp on that type of engine. So if your exhaust system is compromised you might be giving up some power on your builds.

I agree on the super cold air. I don't test if the CF is more than 5%. Fortunately the shop is located at 150 feet elevation and the weather tends to be moderate. So even in the middle of winter the CF rarely gets much below 1.00 and in summer it is rarely over 1.05.

BTW, I'm used to internet guys not believing the numbers. I had a 470 inch Mopar that made 600 hp and everyone thought that was a reasonable build. I spent 18 months, ran 120 dyno pulls and spent about $20K on parts and then that engine made 775 on pump gas. At that point a whole bunch of people started saying the numbers were wrong and the dyno was happy. None of these people had helped me with the engine or paid for the parts or spent 120 dyno pulls in the cell but they all "knew" the numbers were wrong.

Nice engine.

As much as it may come off "wrong" to some folks I am going to have to agree with Brent here and say that those numbers are really, really strong for that mild a build.  It's making 1.45 horsepower per cube, somewhere around 2.3 horsepower per cfm (using Blair's flow numbers), and about 1.33 pounds of torque per cubic inch.

All of these ARE achievable numbers - but not very common for any engine that by your description is on its first round of tuning.  I rarely see that level of performance from any FE engine that just got assembled with a first effort cam selection, first go around with a set of new heads, first round of tuning on an EFI system, and non-optimized timing.  Takes me quite a bit of work to approach that level using highly developed parts I have a lot of history with.  The electric water pump is worth about a dozen horsepower in my testing.

The dyno data and videos do show some sort of anomaly that might be worth investigating.  The inlet air temperature on the dyno screen shows 48 degrees F, which is pretty close to outside air in that area that week.  Using weather data for that area, the correction factor may well have been at zero or 1% with those inputs.  However the inlet air temperature on the snapshot of the data log from the FAST system shows 61 degrees F during a pull.  That variance would give about a =/-2% variance in correction.  They might have a sensor location or calibration issue.  I assume that the data log is an early effort since it shows a 24% fuel correction and still very lean compared to your target (although the lean number is closer to what I run for best power...)

Account for the 2% and about a dozen for the water pump & you get into the 670s for power and 615ish torque at +/- 1.27/cube - - - still really strong numbers and closer to what I would expect to see from a well thought out build with very good parts.

Barry, you are correct about the 48 degree inlet air on the dyno console and the 61 degree air from the MAT. However, I think the effect is the opposite of what you suggested. The dyno correction factor is looking at the cold air being pulled into the dyno room. The temp probe is next to the inlet screen coming in from outside so that is why it is reading 48 degrees. And the correction factor is based off of the 48 degrees. The 61 degrees is the temp inside the intake manifold. That is the MAT sensor and the MAT sensor is not hooked up to the dyno so it is not correcting for 61 degree air. If we corrected for 61 degree air then the correction factor would be higher than 1% and the engine would be making more than 700 hp.

If you study the EFI sensors you'll get some clues as to why the engine made 700 hp. The MAT is in the low 60s and the MAP is close to 100 kpa. So the air inside the intake manifold is cold and dense. Basically perfect conditions.

I don't think there are any calibration errors with the dyno setup. If someone knows better then let me know and we'll fix it. Like I said before, the load cell is calibrated and the correction factor is conservative rather than aggressive. We're using outside air temp rather than hot air. We're running the engine at 180 degree temp rather than making cold water "power" runs. We have good dyno headers on this engine which is worth some power. Most FE engine builds I see have passenger car headers on them which cost some power.

The Comp rocker arms worked great. We checked the lash after a bunch of dyno pulls and nothing had moved around. The engine is running clean, no trash in the filter and no leaks on the floor. The one piece rear main seal is dry as a bone. Here is a picture of the rocker arms after some dyno pulls.

I should point out that Rich from FAST Man EFI was a big help in setting up the tune. This was the first tune I'd work on for a FAST system so I needed a little help. I sent him the tune I built and he tweaked it a bit and then he got on the phone with me while we were on the dyno and offered some suggestions. The tune was fairly close out of the box but this engine wanted a little more fuel up top and a lot less down low.

Fairly efficient engine from what I can see so far. Used about 300 lbs/hr to make 700 hp so that is 3/7 or .43 BSFC. Probably due to the heart shaped chamber and the tight quench.

Looks like these Trick Flow heads make good power. The 482 made 700 hp at 6300 rpm and 640 ft-lbs at 5300 rpm. Correction factor was 1%, coolant temp was 180 degrees, we ran 32 and 34 degrees of advance so there might be more power in the heads by stepping up to 35 or 36 degrees. Pump gas unleaded premium fuel. I'll attach a dyno graph and a screen shot of the EFI data log.

We also needed special tapered pushrods to clear the bottom of the rocker arms. Smith Bros made the custom pushrods by starting with thick wall 3/8 tubing and then tapering the ends.

So bottom line is if you're going to run a decent amount of lift with the new Trick Flow heads be prepared for some visits to the machine shop.

We needed 0.020 thick intake gaskets to get the proper alignment. Cometic made us the correct gaskets and they changed the port size on their standard gasket to fit the Trick Flow port shape. So going forward people should be able to order the correct Trick Flow gasket from Cometic.

Article published on Hot Rod website today:  http://www.hotrod.com/articles/new-product-overview-ford-fe-heads-trick-flow/