Fast NA BB Small Tire 67Camaro Questions Answered #horsepower #bigblock #noprepdragrace #enginebuild

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]All right, you guys. I feel bad that I haven't made a video in so long. I have been so busy that I have a ton of recorded material. I just have not had time to sit down and do an edit. So, I'm going to give you one with no edit. Um, and answer some of your questions.

[00:00:18]Uh, how do what fuel do we run with 17 to1 compression? It's over 17 to1. We run 116 octane race gas or higher.

[00:00:28]Either VP, soco, Renegade, they all make it. I had a lot of questions about the pistons in this engine. Uh, this is one of them. This was the pattern piston.

[00:00:41]When I got this, I I bought this thing in pieces and I got 14 pistons with it.

[00:00:49]And you can see in here where I've profiled out a bunch of material.

[00:00:55]I believe this it's been so long. I think this was the starting out number of how much it weighed and this is the finish number once we got the weight out. And when you start doing the math on the RPM that this thing runs and how much force that is to just get that little bit of weight out. [snorts] And then this is the top of the piston because I literally mocked this up in the engine.

[00:01:18]Would have been like this.

[00:01:21]Had the the crank in the piston, the rod, and had the head bolted on. Had an intake and exhaust valve out of the head.

[00:01:31]Or actually the springs were off, but the valves were in. And then I just reached down. I pushed the valve down against the piston and literally spun the valves. That's what these marks are.

[00:01:43]And marked so I knew exactly where to cut. And then it's kind of off of here, but I needed to go 60 deeper on the intake one. Can't remember on the exhaust.

[00:01:56]But anyway, that's how I did the that's how I figured out the profile of the piston. The other thing is this used to have a full skirt around the bottom of this piston.

[00:02:06]Uh, this this let me get this on a better back lit.

[00:02:11]This radius here used to be here. It used to go and I cut all that off. I just hand ground all of that off. You can see the grind marks on the piston and it was just to get weight out of this thing. So, I ground stuff out of the bottom of the piston. And I ground stuff, ground off the skirt. And then [snorts] I cut so the valve reliefs were deep enough and where they were. So that's how we get away with 17,000 piston to valve clearance. But again, it's on the intake stroke. And so the piston is already rounded top dead center. It's already on its way down.

[00:02:51]And the intake valve is literally chasing the piston. And at one point it's [snorts] about 17,000 away from it, which is close. Um, the other thing is the heads grow about 20,000 of an inch because there's so much material welded onto the deck of the heads. That's how I got the chambers down to 76 cc's. And that's also the heads were rolled. Uh, I think we got about an 11 degree valve angle out of these. And so about, you know, about an inch of material probably was welded to the deck and then it was angle mil massively. And so the sheet metal intake had to get built. So when when they say sheet metal, every piece of this manifold started out just a flat piece of aluminum sheet metal. So all of this under here, all this down in here, that was all just flat sheet metal. And then the two flanges for the the thick flanges that bolt to the head. That was just thick aluminum stock that I just cut.

[00:03:58]And then [snorts] the plywood spacer that got a lot of comments. So once the manifold was done, uh I wanted to see if increasing this plenum volume. So the plenum is the area above the intake runners. These are the intake runners that go to the individual intake ports.

[00:04:17]This area that connects everything together, this whole big top of the manifold area, this is called the plenum.

[00:04:27]And I wanted to increase the volume in the plenum. And I didn't want to spend 6 hours making the spacer to increase the volume out of aluminum, which would have just taken six hours out of my day to bolt it in there and find out that it didn't work. So, I just cut it out of a piece of plywood with a jigsaw quickly and put it in and it worked so good I just left it.

[00:04:49]Didn't even bother to change it. The carb spacers, these are commercially purchased. They're just called phenolic spacers. Uh, just helps keep some of the heat out of the carburetors. But [snorts] between this also helping with heat dissipation and these uh the carburetors are literally cold. There's there's like virtually no heat in the carburetors at all.

[00:05:16]So in the previous video I went over the valve train. So I'm not going to bore you with that again. Everything on this engine is handmade. It's a it's a one-off prototype.

[00:05:27]Um, it took a long time to do everything and get it to all work and you can't just buy this stuff off the shelf anywhere. And so that's why it was so gratifying to go into these bigger races back in the day when I raced in the PSCA. I qualified number one at every single event. And so that what they did is they just kept slapping weight on me. And I used to have a an engine that I did before this one that was even more exotic than this one is, and I sold it.

[00:06:02]And I might buy it back. I might honestly buy it back because it was such an interesting build. Um, these heads are the original Big Chief heads. This was when Big Chiefs first came out. The the part number ends in 427.

[00:06:20]So, a lot of people refer to these as the old 427 heads. And these were technically a symmetrical port head, not a spread port head where the distance between these is completely equal, [snorts] but symmetrical. In other words, these big block Chevy heads don't have a good port and a bad port.

[00:06:38]They're all good. The heads, uh, and again, keep in mind, this engine was done in 1988.

[00:06:46]It was a qualifying Protock engine back then.

[00:06:53]and [snorts] it's had mods done since then, some oiling mods and mainly in the valveetrain and reliability.

[00:07:01][snorts] Uh it's it's at about 1,200 horsepower now, so it actually makes a little more than it did back then.

[00:07:07][snorts] And um we qualified in 1989 in a 89 Firebird with this engine in protock, which is extremely difficult to do. It's incredibly difficult to do. 40 cars show up for a 16 car field and the number one and the number 16 qualifier are separated by a tenth of a second or less. So very difficult to qualify in Protock in my opinion. Now Protock is boring. It's they all look the same.

[00:07:38]They all run the same. Everybody's got the same engine.

[00:07:42]Uh when I got out of it, they were just starting to purchase horsepower and there was like the five or six guys that built Protock engines. Nobody was building their own stuff anymore.

[00:07:53]And we built all of our own stuff.

[00:07:56]Everything was done in-house.

[00:07:58]Nobody [snorts] else could build what we built. And again, I didn't own any of this stuff. I worked for the Scribers. I worked for Joe Leone Jr. And I worked for Kurt Johnson in his rookie season.

[00:08:10]In fact, I was standing on the starting line when he wrecked the Torco car in Phoenix. [snorts] And at some point, I'll show you guys all the pictures of that car cuz I'm the one that built that car and that was only at second race and he totaled it.

[00:08:27]So, there's a little update. I'm sorry that I haven't posted sooner, but again, I just haven't had time to even sit down and edit anything. And so you're going to get this video raw, real, and unedited.

[00:08:53]You want to know the only place in the world you should ever use red lockctite?

[00:08:57]Okay, maybe not the only place. This ARP bolt right here that's holding this 7,000 RPM converter to the flex plate. Definitely red Loctite that bolt