65 Barracuda 318 Rebuild, Cam, timing, lifters maybe a kit?

Bighead440 said
Most people on here and other forums recommend the latest wiz-bang cams after never having run one in the OP's combination or similar. Reliably pepping-up a low compression 318 isn't child's play. Having ran the 272 Energizer, .454" lift, 110*LSA in my personal '86 D-250 3/4 ton (heavy-5,000lb) truck with a 727 trans and 31.5x16 tires and 3.55 gears, I can testify that it sounded serious and responded from an idle well enough to tow a loaded car trailer (6000+lb) from a dead stop and cruise as fast as you dared on the interstate. My business partner has a '76 D-300 dually with a warmed up 440 and 4.10s and he was impressed. If you have an A-body and use the same setup with say, 3.23 gears and a 11" torque converter with maybe 2200 stall, that Summit cam would be cheap bliss in my opinion, without noisy valvetrain sounds and minimum companion items to make it work.

Agreed 100% on the work to get the CR up. And agreed 100% on the potential valvetrain noise, etc. BTW, I have raced thousands of miles on a much WORSE cam and CR combination than you had in your truck ....7.6 SCR with a 300 cam .... DCR in the high 5's LOL.....Absolutely 'deadsville' below 3700 RPM! So there is more experience behind all this than you may be realizing.

And, we don't know how high you had to rev up your 272 cammed truck engine to get it rolling in that towing operation, or how slow it was to roll out... and once on the interstate, with the engine revved up, it was past the 'low RPM dead zone', so that is not any evidence about the 272 cam and low RPM problems with too low CR (low DCR). Nor do you know how different it would have been with a smaller cam. And now the OP is being advised to change the TC to 2200 RPM to make this 272 cam work well in a lighter car .....so that pretty much says that this 272 is not a cam for low RPM and low CR.

Bottom line: You benefited from the better lift and overall duration at mid and upper RPM's with that 272 cam, but not at low RPM's.

But that does bring out one point.... with the engine out, it would be a snap to change the TC....assuming this is an auto trans car....which we still don't know.

FWIW, my son's 340 has 10:1 CR and we did not go past 268 on the cam duration. (DCR=8.0) We cared more about low and mid-range RPM than peak HP numbers for what we do... which is quick take-offs, all street driving more like road race or rally, not drag racing.

318willrun said
I have this cam in a 318 now.

And you know as much as anyone about low RPM torque problems:

You milled your 360 heads with excellent knowledge of what too low a compression would do when you cam up.
Your own words about your car at the strip are that ' 60 ft times are lacking'....meaning a 'soft' engine combination at low RPM's....