AJ's Opinion; my super-fun, 360/A-833/3.55 street-combo

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>>Now a word about pressure;
With iron heads;
91pump-gas will only support up to about 170psi and only if you know what yur doing. For each lesser grade you will have to lose 5psi, and if your quench is not tight enough, another 5 or more psi. So if you want to run 87gas with open-chamber iron, you might have to be satisfied with 155psi; FORGET about Scr; the engine does not even know what Scr is. You have to build to a pressure.
But with alloy heads,
we have a different situation. Right here on FABO we have guys running 200psi still on pumpgas. So to run 87 full time with a tight Q, this seems to indicate that 190psi is possible, and that is what I was aiming for. In one of my combos, it ran a tic over 190psi ,still on 87E10. So I'm willing to go there. You may not be. But 185/180 is easily doable.
Now a word about VP;
read about V/P here; V/P Index Calculation
If yur running an automatic, you can run a higher-stall TC and never know that your bottom-end is weak. But this thread is for manual-trans street cars, that start off in the soft zone every single time, and with 3.55s, stay in the soft zone or, double-back into it after a shift, back and forth all day long; so we don't want that! Nor do I, in particular, enjoy revving my engine to 3000, like a an old Mustang,every time I take off.
So as a streeter with 3.55s, I adopted the high VP strategy.
Well that didn't work out for me with my first cam, more on that later.
Ok so now, lets talk about C/E some more.
My three combos have been 212 then 227, and finally 219.
I can tell you that 227 was a fantastic number.
I can tell you that 212 was a lousy number. and
I can tell you that 219 is a reasonable compromise. And that is why it has stayed in my engine since 2004.
But the 219C/E was NOT happy with the regular 2.66 low A833, and 3.55s. I found that it really liked 4.30s better having a dump-it-and-go street-friendly attitude. So then,
4.30 x 2.66=11.44.. Next I got me a 3.09 low Commando A833 and re-installed the 3.55s, for a new starter gear of 3.09 x3.55=10.97 which was close enough. But that was only the first compromise.
The next compromise was the fact that the 219 C/E could not muster very much power-extraction no matter where I installed it at. The 219C/E could make only 105* of extraction at 108 installed centerline. I moved that cam a lil, , but no matter, it is what it is...... compared to the 227C/E cam.
So the take away for me was that 110* of extraction was about as low as I wanted to go. But with the 219C/E cam this left only 109*for compression, with an Ica then of 71*! Which would drop my VP to 126 which is 5.2M territory, and even with my new starter gear I knew I wouldn't like that at all. So there was no sense in re-timing the cam again. So I left the split at 114* compression/ 105* extraction.