cam question
guys that take issue with 302 heads, have you done any porting to them before running them?
Nope. I refuse to port that head. It sucks. Grinding on them minimally reduces the amount of suck they are.
Do what Mopar Official told you a long time ago. Stuff those castings up someone else's butt and buy the correct 360 head. Leave the 1.88 valve in there and put the grinder away. It will run a ton better with way less money and time wasted.
I just don't get the hard on so many guys have for that emissions head. Part of it I know comes from reading so called hot rod magazine article and now with the web it's even worse. Just because a chamber is of the open variety doesn't make it a bad head, and just because a chamber is of the closed variety doesn't make it a good head. That's just rediculous thinking. That chamber is marginal a best and you can grind until you hit air, coolant, exhaust...whatever and that port will still suck.
Also, it doesn't take a very long search to learn that a "wide" LSA does NOT make more bottom and mid range power and torque over a "narrow" LSA. In fact, it is quite the opposite.
I used quotation marks because who gets to determine what is "wide" and what is "narrow"? Beats me, other that the fact that at this point, we get to work with LSA's from ~102-116 or so. So a 110 LSA is really a mid LSA if you like picking the fly poop out of the pepper. And the 110 was selected as the de facto LSA for about 95% of their shelf grinds not because it's better. No, hell no. They did that because they know that virtually 100% of their cores will take a 110 LSA without issue. When you get down to a 107 LSA, you start setting aside probably 30-35% of the cores because you can't fit a 107 LSA on it. Get to 105 and 97% of the cores won't take it. The decision was purely profit based (and I'm fine with that, but the consumer needs to know why it was done) and not based on a correct LSA for most anything, especially with OE type heads.
That said, I want to point out that LSA should be the result of what the correct TIMING number are, and not some arbitrarily picked number.
Let's take two cams. They have the exact same timing. Exact same. One is on a 108 and the other is on a 112. What does that tell you??? I know what it tells me. Let me say I wouldn't understand this except for the late Harold Brookshire, who was the owner of Ultradyne Racing Cams. He also made lobes for a number of companies before he died. In fact, the Lunati VooDoo line of lobes are all Harold's lobes.
So.....to take that 108 LSA cam and make it a 112 LSA what happened? You have to retard the intake lobe, advance the exhaust lobe or some of both.
The opposite is true. To take the cam on the 112 LSA, you have to either advance the intake lobe and retard the exhaust or some of both? Do you see that?? It is 4 AM right now, and I'm not feeling good so I may have the adjustments incorrect but someone can come along and clean that part up. The point is this: you can't change the LSA without changing the timing.
The correct way to pick your LSA is use all your numbers and then, and only then, set your intake open and closing points, and your exhaust opening and closing points that are optimum for YOUR combo and then whatever the LSA is, it is.
You'll get the right cam then, and not some screw ball cam with screw ball timing just to get an "LSA" that someone thinks is better.
Sorry for the long post.
