482" FE Stroker, 582 HP, 581 Torque

[jayb]

Performance Summary:
      Cubic Inches:  482             Dyno brand:  Superflow 901
      Power Adder:   No            Where dynoed:  FE Power
      Peak Horsepower:  582
      Peak Torque:  581

Horsepower and Torque Curves:



Engine Specifications:
   Block brand, material, finished bore size, other notes:  Pond aluminum block, 4.25" bore
     
   Crankshaft brand, cast or forged, stroke, journal size:  Scat forged 4.25" stroke crank, BBC journals
     
   Connecting Rods brand, material, center to center distance, end sizes, bolts:  Molnar 6.700" BBC rods

   Piston brand, material (caster, hypereutectic or forged), dish/dome volume, static CR:  Mahle forged pistons, 11:1 compression

   Main Bearings, Rod Bearings, Cam Bearings brand and size:  Federal Mogul 351C 3/4 groove bearings, Clevite CB743 Rod Bearings .001 undersize, Durabond cam bearings for side oiler

   Piston rings brand, size, other notes:  Mahle thin rings, came with pistons

   Oil Pump, pickup, and drive:  Precision Oil Pumps HV pump, pickup for Cobra Pan, Precision Oil Pumps drive

   Oil pan, windage tray, oil filter adapter:  Cobra pan, Ford windage tray, Ford oil filter adapter

   Camshaft brand, type (hyd/solid, flat tappet or roller), lift and duration (adv and @.050")  Comp Cams hydraulic roller cam from Lykins Motorsports, 299/305, 243/252@.050, .610/.603

   Lifters brand, type:  Morel hydraulic rollers, standard (not short travel)

   Timing chain and timing cover:  Cloyes billet timing chain set, FE Power timing cover

   Cylinder heads brand, material, port and chamber information:  Trick Flow heads, out of the box, no porting

   Rocker arm brand, type (adjustable or non-adj), material, ratio:  Harlan Sharp rocker arm package, adjustable, stock ratio

   Pushrods brand, type, length:  Trend ball-cup pushrods, 3/8"

   Valve covers, brand, type:  Cal Custom, vintage

   Distributor brand, advance curve information:  Ford distributor with Pertronix, advance all in at 3600

   Harmonic balancer brand:  Professional Products

   Water pump brand, type (mechanical or electric):  Edelbrock mechanical

   Intake manifold brand, material, porting information:  Ford tunnel wedge intake

   Carburetor(s) brand, type:  Ford Holley carbs, 650 cfm, AC/AD (I think)

   Exhaust manifolds or headers brand, type:  Hooker competition plus


I have a local friend with a 57 Ford that has been equipped with a 428 forever.  He has been looking to upgrade the engine package so he came to me to help put it together.  This has turned out to be a long project, because of block availability.  We waited for over a year to get a BBM block and never could get one, so this spring he decided to go forward with a Pond aluminum block for this engine. 

At the machine shop the Pond block required pretty much all the finish machining, including align honing the main saddle and cam bearing bores, and sizing the lifter galleries.  Once that was finished we were finally able to get going on the assembly, with the parts specified above.  This was my first experience with Trick Flow heads, and I must say I was impressed.  Looking at the intake ports, they get pretty small in cross sectional area inside the port, but the short turn is much improved over a stock or Edelbrock/BBM heads, and this showed up in the torque production.  The engine went together without too much trouble, although the block did require 351C main bearings (FE main bearings wouldn't fit), and the connecting rods measure big on the big end with standard size bearings, so I had to go with .001" undersized bearings.

My friend wanted the engine to look more or less stock, so he had me paint the block and heads Ford dark blue.  Almost killed me to do that LOL!  Here's a picture of the completed engine:



We got the engine on the dyno this past weekend.  We were hoping for 600 HP but didn't quite get there.  However, we also didn't try some of the standard tricks, like spacers, and despite the high RPM nature of the tunnel wedge intake the torque curve was very impressive.  So, as a street car this thing is really going to work well.  We started off with 110 octane race fuel and sneaked up the timing curve and RPM range until we got to 33-34 total and just over 6000 RPM.  However, starting at about 6100 RPM, the engine power fell off a cliff.  Something with the valvetrain was going on there, and my suspicion is either the hydraulic rollers are pumping up and holding the intake valves off the seat, or the valve springs aren't up to the drill.  In any case we decided to limit future excursions to 6000 RPM.  Certainly 600HP would have been achievable at higher RPM, based on the known performance of the tunnel wedge intake.

I want to address an issue about dyno data here, because this engine provides a good example.  Most dynos and/or dyno operators will take advantage of the smoothing function available with the dyno curves.  This function will mathematically modify the dyno data to make the curves look smoother, taking out the normal ups and downs of the torque measurements.  Below I have posted two plots of the dyno results we got when running the engine to 6300 RPM.  The first curve is the actual dyno data, and the second curve is mathematically generated from the actual data using the dyno's smoothing function:





It is clear from the first chart that something fairly dramatic is happening to limit power in the engine after 6100 RPM.  But, from the second chart, not so much.  The curve looks smoother in the second chart, which is what most dyno customers want to see, but it is hiding a serious engine issue.  I've mentioned this before elsewhere, but I always use the actual dyno data, not a smoothed curve, because the smoothing tends to hide problems.

This was designed to be a pump gas engine, so after running on the race gas to get the carbs and ignition dialed in, we backed the timing down 6 degrees and put in some 91 octane non-oxygenated pump gas.  We ran the engine several times, sneaking up to 32 degrees total on timing, and the engine performed nearly as well as it did on race gas.  We could have put a couple more degrees in it, but we decided to stop at 32 total to stay conservative.  Here's a chart showing the comparison between the pump gas and the race gas:



The last thing we tried was to add the oval air cleaner.  This cost some power, but not as much as we were expecting it to:



Overall  a successful dyno session; the engine ran beautifully and it was on and off the dyno in a few hours.  Coming up tomorrow I am doing another one of these 482" engines, but with some old Ford heads and a factory 427 block.  Following that I will be running one of my engines, a 492" engine with ported Edelbrock heads and a solid roller cam, to go in my Fairlane Cobra.  It will be interesting to compare the outputs from all the different motors...

[Stangman]

Just curious if the springs were cam specific or were they the springs that came on the heads. I see the cam came from Brent and he usually sees his hydraulic rollers rev pretty well. All in all nice motor. Without that fall off I think you would have seen your 600.

[jayb]

The springs were whatever came on the heads.  I believe Brent selected the cam with the springs in mind - Jay

[mbrunson427]

Jay, we had a similar experience with the trick flow heads on the dyno. My 465" engine was dyno'd with cast iron heads first, some edelbrock heads, then trick flow. The trick flow heads fell off a cliff at 5900-6000. We knew however that the engine would pull to 6500 based on our previous head testing, so we stayed in it and you can see that the curve comes back around. The cam in my 465" is in the same ball park you're dealing with there, around .610" lift, duration is a bit less, solid roller. We searched around for almost 2 weeks thinking we were running into fuel delivery issues, valve float, that there had to be something going on. Never found a culprit.

We compared dyno data with a local friend that has a 492" FE with trick flow heads in his 69 Fairlane. His dyno curve fell off at 5800 and he figured that's where it gave up. I wish they would have pushed through it on the dyno to see if it behaved in the same nature ours did.

I believe if you talk to Brent/Ross about the Trick Flows they'll tell you cam selection is finicky with the heads.

Our testing was done on an inertia dyno rather than an engine brake dyno, so I believe some of the effects are more dramatic. What I mean is if the testing was done on an engine brake dyno, when it hit that rough patch at 6000, the dyno lets the engine rev up at the rate of 300 rpm/sec anyhow. On this inertia dyno, the engine had to fight through the dip in power production to keep building rpm.

[mbrunson427]

Here's the data with the edelbrock heads for comparison purposes.

[6667fan]

Good stuff Jay. The explanation on smoothing vs actual is nice and all the overlaid graphings are a nice bonus

What is the LSA/ICL?

[blykins]

Jay, we had a similar experience with the trick flow heads on the dyno. My 465" engine was dyno'd with cast iron heads first, some edelbrock heads, then trick flow. The trick flow heads fell off a cliff at 5900-6000. We knew however that the engine would pull to 6500 based on our previous head testing, so we stayed in it and you can see that the curve comes back around. The cam in my 465" is in the same ball park you're dealing with there, around .610" lift, duration is a bit less, solid roller. We searched around for almost 2 weeks thinking we were running into fuel delivery issues, valve float, that there had to be something going on. Never found a culprit.

We compared dyno data with a local friend that has a 492" FE with trick flow heads in his 69 Fairlane. His dyno curve fell off at 5800 and he figured that's where it gave up. I wish they would have pushed through it on the dyno to see if it behaved in the same nature ours did.

I believe if you talk to Brent/Ross about the Trick Flows they'll tell you cam selection is finicky with the heads.

Our testing was done on an inertia dyno rather than an engine brake dyno, so I believe some of the effects are more dramatic. What I mean is if the testing was done on an engine brake dyno, when it hit that rough patch at 6000, the dyno lets the engine rev up at the rate of 300 rpm/sec anyhow. On this inertia dyno, the engine had to fight through the dip in power production to keep building rpm.

I wouldn't say that the cam selection is finicky, they are like any other cylinder head, they just like what they like.  I had this cam ground for Jay for this combination, based off of my own dyno testing with the TFS heads. 

For some reason, I have never seen these kinds of trends, at least not the dyno graph where it looks like a ski slope.  Typically, when we hit a hp peak rpm with a pull, we don't keep going, but I have never seen that steep of a drop off in 100 rpm or so.  As a matter of fact, I've got a couple of engines running TFS heads with standard travel Morels and hydraulic roller camshafts.  One guy shifts at 7000 rpm and the ET falls off if he goes below that. 

With all that being said, a drop off like Jay showed with the "corrected" graph is not what I would really consider abnormal with that combination.  It's a large engine, with a smallish 175cc head, and a 243 @.050" intake duration camshaft.  It's a small cam.  Peaking at 6000-6100 rpm with that cam shows how well the cylinder heads actually work and shows lots of potential. 

I'll have to look up and see what LSA I had it ground with.  It's good data.  I'd also be interested in the A/F ratios that Jay was seeing, along with oil temperatures.  Morel lifters can sometimes be picky about oil viscosity and oil temperatures.  They are assembled with a much tighter tolerance than some of the other lifters, so they won't work in every single circumstance.

Your data is also good data, Mike.  Good to see the out-of-the-box TFS heads showing similar hp and more torque than the $$$$$ Pro Port stuff.  The different heads may want slightly different cam specs, but it's nice to see those results. 

[jayb]

Good stuff Jay. The explanation on smoothing vs actual is nice and all the overlaid graphings are a nice bonus

What is the LSA/ICL?

ICL was 106, can't remember what the LSA was (my friend has the cam card now), but the cam was advanced a few degrees with the 106 intake centerline.

[jayb]

Mike, thanks for that data.  I'm surprised that a cylinder head could behave that way, especially with all the good results that the Trick Flow heads seem to be having.  In fact, Tony Fritz told me at the FE Race and Reunion last year that his engine made 800 HP with an out of the box set of Trick Flows.  Tony is a good guy and I believe him, but I wonder about the dyno he was using; 800 HP seems awfully optimistic.  His Maverick does run in the 9s, though.

When I see something like what happened with this engine on my dyno, I don't rev the engine any higher.  I kind of wish now that I had; the engine didn't sound bad or anything at 6300 RPM, it just quit making power.  If you look in my book at page 228, for the solid vs hydraulic lifter comparison on my 428CJ, you will see the same kind of behavior with a hydraulic lifter.  It looked the same on this engine, but based on your results maybe valvetrain isn't the issue.  On that particular engine, which I had in my Mach 1 for a while, I used to regularly shift at 6500.  The engine always sounded fine.  So I learned long ago that even if horsepower is decreasing, the engine is still making power and should still run to a higher RPM, barring some catastrophic situation (valves hitting the pistons, for example).

Brent, A/F logged by the O2 sensor ranged from 12.45:1 at 5000 to 12.69:1 at 6100 on the best pull.  From the built in A/F calculation on the dyno, where it is measured based on the airflow through the carbs and the fuel flow through the fuel turbines, it went from 13.24 @ 5000 to 12.48 at 6100.  It dipped down to 12.21 at one point, but overall it was in the ballpark.  On the one pull we made to 6300 it got noticeably richer, down to 11.62:1 at 6200.  The chart below shows the airflow through the carbs; note that the airflow is dropping pretty good at 6200 and 6300.



I think its interesting that the front carb used more air at first, and then the back carb took over.  The vacuum secondaries were tie wrapped to open as mechanicals, so its not a variation in opening of the secondaries.  Must have something to do with the intake manifold.

Unfortunately I don't have oil temp, because we didn't have a port to monitor that on this engine.  But I would expect it to be at least the same or higher than the water temp, which was around 155.

By the way, this is a very interesting discussion...

[TurboChris]

Great thread guys.

[Nightmist66]

Good to see the out-of-the-box TFS heads showing similar hp and more torque than the $$$$$ Pro Port stuff.

Do you have a link for your back to back testing?

[blykins]

Good to see the out-of-the-box TFS heads showing similar hp and more torque than the $$$$$ Pro Port stuff.

Do you have a link for your back to back testing?

I don't have any back-to-back testing with TFS vs. Pro Port, but I was referring to Mike Brunson's discussion up above, where he did a back-to-back test of iron heads, Pro Ports, and TFS heads.  The results are up above in his graphs.

[blykins]

Mike, thanks for that data.  I'm surprised that a cylinder head could behave that way, especially with all the good results that the Trick Flow heads seem to be having.  In fact, Tony Fritz told me at the FE Race and Reunion last year that his engine made 800 HP with an out of the box set of Trick Flows.  Tony is a good guy and I believe him, but I wonder about the dyno he was using; 800 HP seems awfully optimistic.  His Maverick does run in the 9s, though.

When I see something like what happened with this engine on my dyno, I don't rev the engine any higher.  I kind of wish now that I had; the engine didn't sound bad or anything at 6300 RPM, it just quit making power.  If you look in my book at page 228, for the solid vs hydraulic lifter comparison on my 428CJ, you will see the same kind of behavior with a hydraulic lifter.  It looked the same on this engine, but based on your results maybe valvetrain isn't the issue.  On that particular engine, which I had in my Mach 1 for a while, I used to regularly shift at 6500.  The engine always sounded fine.  So I learned long ago that even if horsepower is decreasing, the engine is still making power and should still run to a higher RPM, barring some catastrophic situation (valves hitting the pistons, for example).

Brent, A/F logged by the O2 sensor ranged from 12.45:1 at 5000 to 12.69:1 at 6100 on the best pull.  From the built in A/F calculation on the dyno, where it is measured based on the airflow through the carbs and the fuel flow through the fuel turbines, it went from 13.24 @ 5000 to 12.48 at 6100.  It dipped down to 12.21 at one point, but overall it was in the ballpark.  On the one pull we made to 6300 it got noticeably richer, down to 11.62:1 at 6200.  The chart below shows the airflow through the carbs; note that the airflow is dropping pretty good at 6200 and 6300.



I think its interesting that the front carb used more air at first, and then the back carb took over.  The vacuum secondaries were tie wrapped to open as mechanicals, so its not a variation in opening of the secondaries.  Must have something to do with the intake manifold.

Unfortunately I don't have oil temp, because we didn't have a port to monitor that on this engine.  But I would expect it to be at least the same or higher than the water temp, which was around 155.

By the way, this is a very interesting discussion...

800 hp does seem pretty optimistic......  I've had a few approach 700 hp with out of the box heads, but an extra 100 hp is quite a bit.  It takes a LOT of FE on the dyno here to approach 800 hp.

LSA was 115 on this camshaft, I just looked back through notes. 

It's also interesting on your air consumption graph that the two lines crossed at ~5200 rpm, just like HP and torque curves usually do.........interesting indeed. 

Normally, when engines need to be leaned up, I get excited because that means the engine is efficient, but in this case, I'm not so certain on that.

[Tunnelwedge]

Interesting. I run basically the same engine except I use my home valve job BBM's.
482" Genesis block, Scat crank, Mahle pistons, similar size roller cam. Less compression.
The engine works awesome on the street. I have a 4 speed so the max torque is always ready.
I use some home made spacers for the carbs. The tiny flange of the Ford TW is why. The seal surface
is about a 1/4" on mine. I run it as a long distance engine and as a tow engine.
I cool it with a stock 1968 Mustang BB rad and small e fan with no shroud.
I use a small aluminum pully for over driving for the water pump.
I've run it with full electronic ignition and plain old points.
Runs the same either way.
It's been on the street now for 4 years.
I also have power brakes. Disc/drum I don't have any problem with the tiny Mustang booster
using the vacuum from the TW intake.
I mostly drive the engine on the highway at about 3000 rpm, the speed limit.
I does fine it town.
Get a good driveshaft and clamps.

[machoneman]

When I see something like what happened with this engine on my dyno, I don't rev the engine any higher.  I kind of wish now that I had; the engine didn't sound bad or anything at 6300 RPM, it just quit making power.  If you look in my book at page 228, for the solid vs hydraulic lifter comparison on my 428CJ, you will see the same kind of behavior with a hydraulic lifter.  It looked the same on this engine, but based on your results maybe valvetrain isn't the issue.  On that particular engine, which I had in my Mach 1 for a while, I used to regularly shift at 6500.  The engine always sounded fine.  So I learned long ago that even if horsepower is decreasing, the engine is still making power and should still run to a higher RPM, barring some catastrophic situation (valves hitting the pistons, for example).

Jay, we often ran our 10.90 door slammer (BBC, sorry) well past the power curve nearing the 1,320 finish line yet the car went faster and got a terrific top end charge. So yes, the power may drop off but it the e.t's and mph's were good, we'd still rev past the max h.p. level for our combo. I think many a drag racer do the same. 

[blykins]

Jay, we had a similar experience with the trick flow heads on the dyno. My 465" engine was dyno'd with cast iron heads first, some edelbrock heads, then trick flow. The trick flow heads fell off a cliff at 5900-6000. We knew however that the engine would pull to 6500 based on our previous head testing, so we stayed in it and you can see that the curve comes back around. The cam in my 465" is in the same ball park you're dealing with there, around .610" lift, duration is a bit less, solid roller. We searched around for almost 2 weeks thinking we were running into fuel delivery issues, valve float, that there had to be something going on. Never found a culprit.

We compared dyno data with a local friend that has a 492" FE with trick flow heads in his 69 Fairlane. His dyno curve fell off at 5800 and he figured that's where it gave up. I wish they would have pushed through it on the dyno to see if it behaved in the same nature ours did.

I believe if you talk to Brent/Ross about the Trick Flows they'll tell you cam selection is finicky with the heads.

Our testing was done on an inertia dyno rather than an engine brake dyno, so I believe some of the effects are more dramatic. What I mean is if the testing was done on an engine brake dyno, when it hit that rough patch at 6000, the dyno lets the engine rev up at the rate of 300 rpm/sec anyhow. On this inertia dyno, the engine had to fight through the dip in power production to keep building rpm.

Just throwing out more data here.

Here's a 465 I did with OOTB TFS heads, Tunnel Wedge, and setup for a solid flat tappet:



We were at 7250 rpm and decided to not push it higher, but it certainly didn't drop off or dip. 

Here's a 390 that I did with OOTB TFS heads, hydraulic roller with standard travel Morel lifters:



Only lost 8 hp in 500 rpm on that one with a 4150 carb, but didn't drop off at 6500 with a Dominator LOL

Just trying to find a correlation between the heads and the dips that you guys are seeing.

[Nightmist66]

Good to see the out-of-the-box TFS heads showing similar hp and more torque than the $$$$$ Pro Port stuff.

Do you have a link for your back to back testing?

I don't have any back-to-back testing with TFS vs. Pro Port, but I was referring to Mike Brunson's discussion up above, where he did a back-to-back test of iron heads, Pro Ports, and TFS heads.  The results are up above in his graphs.

No worries, just thought you may have tested some somewhere I missed.  Curious which iteration Mike used, there are quite a few options.

[My427stang]

First, I think that is a great engine for it's purpose and any comments are just bench racing/bs-ing

On the TFS heads, I generally end up with about .015-.030 shim and some swapping of springs to get everything where I like them.  That's 7-14 lbs of seat/open pressure at most, not counting spring variance, so not sure it changes much, but w e always do it.

Additionally,  I think you may just have ran out of cam, using similar grinds, but 30 cid less, we ran the peak off the edge of the graph.  I also tend to run that type of lobe a little later, but again, nothing incredible.  I typically put them at 108 on a high vacuum street stroker, so tiny amounts 

I can't help but think that it could be a glitch or loading function of that style dyno.  However, your airflow measuring seems to show that it did do something different.

It beats me, but I did throw some curves below to show we aren't seeing that drop with TFS heads or Morel standard travel lifters and good lobes.

Also, as you know, it's nearly impossible to compare these builds, especially across at least three dynos but:

- 1st one is a TW, iron heads, and it ran up pretty well with standard travel lifters, 241-ish intake lobe but iron heads, same spring pressures as I do on TFS. 
- Second one is short travel lifters, but stock TFS with more spring, similar cam on 433 cid
- Last one is the mildest of the bunch but has both stock TFS and standard travel, with a cam with the same major intensity, unfortunately we didn't run that one out the back as far, but it was still doing well up top, although there is a little bobble at 6000 

Those three though show decent curves past 6000 with std lifters, std head, then both combined, so it's odd the dramatic drop off you see

I have two going on the Stuska pump this week, neither TFS, but one is 482 inches, 330 cfm heads, a medium riser dual quad and a similar cam, but the next one next month will likely be on a local Superflow.  The third is nowhere near the level of engine you just built, but I'll see what I can find on all three to evaluate Morels a bit more closely

I will say, it is a good thing when we are bantering reasons why a 6000 rpm FE is "only" making 580 HP with mostly off the shelf parts!

[mbrunson427]

The conclusion that I came to for myself was this: Something about the head design doesn't agree with the larger cubic inch combinations and requires more cam. I think if we would have switched the cam out for the TFS heads we could make it work.....but that's not what the test was. We'd have to switch the cam to optimize for every different head and the test would be convoluted.

We have one head left to test and I'll post everything up in a big writeup, but the TFS bugs me because it makes for crappy data. The beginning of the curve looks very promising and it looks like it's going to outrun the two previously tested heads, then at 5900 it chokes. The trajectory shows that it's about to make 640-650hp, the other two heads made peak power between 6000-6100. If it carried out that far it'd be a strong running machine....... Maybe when we're done with this last set of heads we'll try the TFS with a different cam.

One more graph. This is our 465" "dyno mule" engine, white line on a superflow dyno, blue line on this inertia dyno we had access to for testing. We weren't real concerned about the numbers the inertia dyno was producing because what matters is the testing was done back to back on the same dyno. I think if we took this engine back over to a normal dyno we'd find that the TFS numbers are very healthy. Not knocking the heads, they perform great, but I wish the graph didn't look like it does. Makes us look like we don't know what we're doing.


Sorry to hijack your thread Jay! When I saw your data I got the feeling that you were running into the same wall we did and it's frustrating.

[6667fan]

Brent, what would a tighter LSA do to the numbers running up to the same rpms?  Also, what A/F ratio do you like to see at full song? Were you hinting the 12.25-12.5 is too fat?

Thanks

[blykins]

The conclusion that I came to for myself was this: Something about the head design doesn't agree with the larger cubic inch combinations and requires more cam. I think if we would have switched the cam out for the TFS heads we could make it work.....but that's not what the test was. We'd have to switch the cam to optimize for every different head and the test would be convoluted.

We have one head left to test and I'll post everything up in a big writeup, but the TFS bugs me because it makes for crappy data. The beginning of the curve looks very promising and it looks like it's going to outrun the two previously tested heads, then at 5900 it chokes. The trajectory shows that it's about to make 640-650hp, the other two heads made peak power between 6000-6100. If it carried out that far it'd be a strong running machine....... Maybe when we're done with this last set of heads we'll try the TFS with a different cam.

One more graph. This is our 465" "dyno mule" engine, white line on a superflow dyno, blue line on this inertia dyno we had access to for testing. We weren't real concerned about the numbers the inertia dyno was producing because what matters is the testing was done back to back on the same dyno. I think if we took this engine back over to a normal dyno we'd find that the TFS numbers are very healthy. Not knocking the heads, they perform great, but I wish the graph didn't look like it does. Makes us look like we don't know what we're doing.


Sorry to hijack your thread Jay! When I saw your data I got the feeling that you were running into the same wall we did and it's frustrating.

I have dyno'd a few large (496-ish) engines with some ported TFS heads.  It only increases the port volume by about 5cc, but the flow increases by about 25 cfm and the horsepower reflects it. 

It could be that the heads are running out of port volume with the big engines, but I wouldn't expect 5cc to be a game changer and on top of all of that, the engines are peaking at a higher rpm with pretty short cam durations.  A 6000 rpm peak, such as on Jay's engine, with just a 243° @ .050" intake duration says a lot to me. 

What I kinda think it is, is just difference between heads.   I've had Joe Craine port quite a few sets for me and he has made remarks about the heads flowing differently and going turbulent at different lifts.  Even though they are all CNC ported, there could very well be something different between castings.   A turbulent port could cause results like you guys are seeing. 

[blykins]

Brent, what would a tighter LSA do to the numbers running up to the same rpms?  Also, what A/F ratio do you like to see at full song? Were you hinting the 12.25-12.5 is too fat?

Thanks

A tighter LSA would increase overlap.  We were sitting at 72° with this camshaft in Jay's customer's engine.  I don't really see the need to go any higher than that as I've made 650 hp with 72° of overlap and TFS heads. 

I originally started at much higher degrees of overlap and through all the iterations of testing and dyno engines, I have found that the heads can generally work just as well without copious amounts of overlap.  That's good for pump gas street engines that need vacuum.   

The engine I referenced earlier, the 445 that made 620 hp with 10.2:1, Performer RPM, etc., just had 61° of overlap and had 13-14" of vacuum, depending on where we set the idle speed.

I like to see 12.5-13.0 at full song depending on the engine, but normally when an engine dips to the low 12's, high 11's, as Jay referenced, I'd be pulling fuel out.  What stinks is that it would have really been nice to have done a HSAB change to see if he could have leaned it up right at the end, but it's so hard to mess with them on older carbs without screw in bleeds.

[Joe-JDC]

From a Tunnel Wedge users point of view, I found that the Ford TW needs to be balanced in flow front to back.  Your graph on the carbs using different airflow quantities proves my point.  The rear intake ports are more straight and flow quite a bit better than those front ports.  I also found on my own engine that you need a spacer to give the plenum more depth so that the air can turn into the ports easier for higher rpm.  If the carbs were not keyed 1:1 and run progressive, you will have a mismatch in fuel ratios.  As for the TFS CNC heads, ALL of them go turbulent and flow stagnates at lifts varying from .580"-.630" lifts out of the box.  With some tweaking I have seen 364 cfm without making the ports significantly larger in volume, all with stock valves.  With a stockish TW, the flow usually comes in around 365cfm average, with the rear ports near 390 cfm, and with a simple cartridge roll will flow 400 cfm.  With 320-330 cfm heads, the intake needs to flow at least 400 cfm.  Also, did you increase the timing with the 110 fuel to find where the horsepower starts to fall off and back it off a degree or so?  Sometimes those heads like 36-37* depending on the ignition being used.  I just did an intake and OOTB TFS heads for a 447 here locally that used a 220* camshaft and made nearly the same horsepower as this one with a Holley Street Dominator and 750Holley.  I know dynos are different, but this dyno is close to those at EMC at both places in Ohio.  Joe-JDC

[6667fan]

The ability to easily swap out air bleeds is a sweet feature on Quick Fuels, ( and newer Holley’s).
I set a timer once and I had four bleeds swapped in under 5 minutes,(removal to install) on my 2 x 4 set up.

[mbrunson427]

What I kinda think it is, is just difference between heads.   I've had Joe Craine port quite a few sets for me and he has made remarks about the heads flowing differently and going turbulent at different rpms.  Even though they are all CNC ported, there could very well be something different between castings.   A turbulent port could cause results like you guys are seeing.

This makes sense to me. Could be seeing varied results caused by differences in heads. On our flow bench, these TFS heads went turbulent at .590". The port turbulence is what we blamed the power results on.