RPM and stock 360 pan

gregcon said

I'd rather use a Briggs & Stratton than a Pontiac lol.

I'm not sure 'failure to drain back' is entirely a lifter valley issue. Don't forget, much of what drains through those big passages falls right onto the crankshaft and (can) get whipped around so that it only eventually reaches the bottom of the sump. I think oil return is multi-faceted affair.

Either way, I've had big blocks lose their oil pressure from sucking the pan dry.....do nothing but let them sit a while and they start up with oil pressure again. These all had one thing in common - 100% stock oiling systems with HV pumps.

I also seem to recall reading/hearing about police cars with 440's that would starve for oil in high speed pursuits. These were considered properly maintained cars so I can't say they were low on oil, etc.

I'd be willing to bet if you took a bone stock 1970 Challenger 440-4 car and ran it on Bonneville, wide open, it'd run out of oil before it ran out of anything else.

Click to expand...

The big blocks came with a pan at least one quart too small. It’s a wonder they didn’t kill more of them.

It’s not that the pan is getting sucked dry, the heads hold a quart, the filter has a quart and the rest of the system is close to a quart. And then what happens when Joe Blow and his buddy Joe **** the rag man don’t check the oil and it’s a quart low??? Rut roh raggy, we got truble...

That’s 2 plus 1 plus 1 for 4 quarts total. That doesn’t count any oil trapped by the worthless skirted block. Unless it’s cross bolted, it’s a power loser. And even if it IS cross bolted, it’s a power loser.

When David Nickens was developing the 99 hemi, one of the things he did was mill the skirt off the passenger side of the block. It took about 2 hours to pull the pan, and about 4 hours to put it back on. That’s right from his own mouth.

He didn’t say how much power they gained by getting rid of the skirt, but he said it was worth the labor without question.

The moral of the story is you can run a engine out of oil, but the pump doesn’t do it.