Thank you Doug for the pictures. I was busy and ultimately didn't take as many pictures as I would have liked.
Five weeks ago I thought I was going to have to bow out of the competition due to not having connecting rods for the Y-Block combination I was planning on building. Joe Craine stepped up and offered to loan me his billet crank and h-beam rods sitting here for the Y that is being built for his '55 'Bird. While my original combination was going to be just shy of 401 cubic inches, Joe's crank and rods allowed me to come up with a 375 incher. Roughly about a quarter of an inch in stroke difference between the two cranks. As it turns out, the 375 incher ran quite well. The new fuel injection manifold designed by John and Geoff Mummert was still warm out of the molds when Joe received one for an initial examination. Joe called me saying it could use some additional work as which point I let him have a free hand in doing some interior mods to it. This manifold was originally designed to mount a throttle body to the front of it, some injectors in the sides and have a fuel injection manifold on your run of the mill Y. It's been modified to mount a pair of Holleys on the top either inline or sideways mounted. Initial testing had the carbs inline and when repositioning the carbs in a sideways orientation, there was no noted change in HP or TQ numbers. But jetting is definitely easier in the sideways format.
Being the number two engine to run during the competition, it pretty much puts a score up on the board that allows the remaining competitors to shoot for. As it turned out, the 2785 point score held out to the end.
As Royce mentioned, he brought three engines to this fight. And to make it more difficult, it's three different engine families. Great job by Royce and especially considering how fast the MEL engine was assembled during the prior week. Pistons arrive Wednesday, engine is assembled Thursday, and fireup on a test stand on Friday. That's incredible. While the rocker arm bolt failure on the MEL engine came after making a couple of good pulls at the Challenge, the potential of that engine is now evident.
That's my story and I'm sticking by it. Ted Eaton.
