The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area The HiPo Shop Let's build a bumblebee on steroids- - - - -

Back in the 1950s, there was a sign on the wall of my father's race engine shop in Nashville Tennessee- - - - -

Build 'em little- - - -
Wind 'em tight- - - - -
Get the chemicals just right!

That slogan was referring to the flathead Fords he was building for the dirt track, with much shorter strokes than his competition, and huge overbores. Then he fueled them with a mixture of Methanol and Hydrogen Peroxide that would make your eyes water from a hundred feet away from the exhaust fumes. I've got a modernized version of that idea on the drawing board- - - - -a Chevy 305 engine with a destroked 283 crankshaft that will displace about 250 cubic inches. With a roller cam and a lightweight valve train, it should run all day at about 9K RPM and stay together. Stay tuned- - - - - -!
Jerry

Looks like Jerry has is creative juices flowing this morning... Must be that Tennessee water in his coffee. I'm hanging on every word!

That Tennessee water tastes a lot better after it drips out of a coil of copper tubing several feet long!
LOL!
Jerry

What we need to do is schedule a work weekend at Jerry's to help him get his shop set back up so he can get to these projects ... and ours

Problem is I would never want to leave..

There’s a guy on YouTube building a modern GM “302”….i can post a link later but he calls the project EZ 302.

It’s a modern, one piece rear main, roller block. Crank is another late model (oddball displacement escapes me at the moment) short stroke piece. I think maybe he’s using Vortec head castings.

Pretty cool project. Kinda the same general idea. Spin it fast.

He's probably using the Chevy 262 crankshaft- - - -3.1" stroke, 4" bore, and 350-sized main and rod bearings. 311 cubic inches, and it can be built with mostly "over the counter" parts.

Your are right….i went and looked it up. Crank is from a 4.3 V8 used in some mid 90s Caprice style cars.

There's also a 3" stroke version of that crankshaft, one with a full circle rear main bearing seal. It's listed for some of the Caprice models. The 262 is an earlier engine that has the 2 piece seal. Mine will spin even faster- - - -it uses a 2 7/8" stroke, same as a Ford 289. Smaller rod and main bearings and NASCAR H beam rods- - - -much less rotating drag. A single Quadrajet carb will flow enough mixture for the engine to turn 8K+ RPM .
Jerry

That’s the one I’m talking about. Different than the 262, I guess.

Back in the early 1970s one of our competitors on the California dirt tracks ran nothing but 302 engines. Back then we called them "301s"- - - -283s bored out to 4". Chevy cheated half a cubic inch and called a 301.44 cubic inch engine a "302". Those rebored 283s had cylinder walls so thin they blew out occasionally- - - - -.125" oversize!

The 283 bored out .060 & .125 were very common in the 60’s in our area among the street racers & drag racers. They were 292’s & 301’s. An easy & inexpensive way to go fast. Add some double hump heads & a Corvette over the counter solid lifer cam would complete the package.

I plan on putting a 283 bored .040" over in my 55.1 truck. Mostly due to the cubic inch value. I figure I will get a weird look when I say it has a 289 in it. Lol.

I have the 283 I saved from a '67 C10 a friend and I pulled out of the woods this Spring. He has LS plans for the Truck. There was no way I was going to let a 283 factory 4 barrel go to scrap.

I have a few ideas for it. It has the Power Pack heads and a Quadrajet.

Those "power pack" heads are 70 years old, or more, and most of them have been rebuilt several times. If you can find a set of heads for a 305 4 barrel engine with the 58 CC combustion chambers, they'll outperform the power pack, and they can be ported and bigger valves installed to gain even more gas flow. They're 30+ years newer.
Jerry

Yeah built me one of those '301" back in'65. It was bad till it got a little to hot at Shady Side drag strip one weekend and cracked couple cylinder walls 🙂

The 283 I have has never been rebuilt... I did a lot of work to the heads on my 327 for my '59. They are Double hump as well. I had them surfaced .010 just to clean then up, 2.02' intake valves and 1.60' stainless exhaust. I had bronze guides installed and did a little porting. They are CC'd to 59. All together just under $900.00 for both heads.

When I was building "claimer" engines for round track cars we were required to run the 76CC "smog" heads as an "economy" measure. In theory, any competitor could buy someone else's engine for $1K . In practice, nobody ever did that, and we were all cheating on the buildup costs. I found out that by angle-milling the big chamber heads, the 76CC chamber became 60CC- - - - -higher compression than a 64CC double hump head, which was illegal for the class we ran. All the tech inspectors ever did was look at casting numbers. Ray Charles could have spotted the modification, if he knew where to put his fingers on an assembled engine, but the tech guys either didn't know what to look for, or deliberately overlooked it. Some custom whittling had to be done on the intake manifold to make it fit properly, so the manifold and heads had to be changed as a matched set when we built up another short block. Those engines actually cost us around $3K or more each to build.
Jerry

Didn't the 283 and early 327 cranks have the same size main & rod journals? If so, why bore a 283 to 4" when an early 327 block with a 4" bore would accept a shorter (3") stroke 283 crank providing a 301/302?

Yes, the early 327s and the first year or two of the "302" had a small journal crankshaft. Early 283s had enough cylinder wall thickness to bore them .125" without getting into trouble before the 327 was introduced in 1962. At one time there was a set of main bearings available with thicker steel shells to adapt a 350 block to a 283 crankshaft. Those bearings are VERY scarce these days. It's also possible to leave the main bearings in place on a 350 block and line bore them to accept a set of 283 mains. That way, a 4 bolt main 350 can be turned into a really bulletproof 302.

Here's a real Rube Goldberg idea- - - - -a 400 small block with a destroked 283 crankshaft- - - - -4 1/8" bore, 2 7/8" stroke- - - - -307 cubic inches!
Jerry

I think I still have a set of the inserts to use a 350 crankshaft in the 400 block.

372 cubic inches- - - -we built those destroked 400s to stay just under the 375 CID limit at the track we ran in Merced California, back in the early 1970s. One guy ran a big block engine that he claimed was a 366- - - -but he was known to swap in a 427 at about midseason when the points race got tight.
Jerry

Jerry this is similar to the high reving destroked LS (or big bore 4.8) that I’m currently building. LQ4 6.0 block bored to 4.065 with a 4.8(3.268) crank and 6.300” rods. It has 12 cc domed Mahle pistons and LS3 heads decked to 66 cc. Should be 11.5:1 compression and 8000rpm all day too.

That 11.5 CR is going to need a pretty radical cam- - - - -or an alcohol/nitro fuel mix.
Jerry

It's going to be mostly pump gas. Cam specs are 245/256 .657"/.655" 108 LSA 106 ICL

Good luck keeping pistons in it. You're going to have massive detonation problems. That's a 9.5:1 compression cam.
Jerry