MRL Performance
Well-Known Member
Man oh man, what a engine this is. I have a repeat customer(my fav BTW) that brought his brother over to the shop with a truck load of parts. Says "Make it work".
Fist off the crank is BLUE, the rods are BLUE ect. Nice, what the hell am I going to do with all this. The piston pins are all stuck in the pistons, floating pins. Heads are cracked and it has broken keepers and bent valves. Great. Block is burned between 2 cylinders, "Save the block" he says. And its a 440 with a 4.440" bore. "Have to reuse the pistons, so no over bore". And guess what, the bore dont look good. HUGE Dome pistons, 2 F'ed up cams. Well, he has money and he is a good customer, so lets get to work.
Have the block welded and decked, honed the cylinder as best we could without going to big. Maged the crank, no cracks. But its bent and twisted. Fix all that. Replace all the rod bolts and resize the big end. Clean the piston pin bore as best I could, still pretty bad. But the rod bushings are nice, so we have to just go with it.
Calls me to tell me "I got a good deal on some Victor heads, can we use those?" Sure but with those domes you will be 15 to 1!!!! So we chuck the pistons on the mill and start cutting. Domes gone, now we have flat tops. took 56g off the piston! DAMN! Now we rebalance the crank, rods and pistons.
New rings, bearings, cam, lifters. Get the head here and, WTF??? Whoever had them before should not be working on this stuff. Its a Std port Victor, but some ya-hoo decided to "open" them to Max Wedge. Problem is they only opened them about 1" into the port! Now it looks like a trumpet. So I guess I have a bit of grinding to do. I took a LOT of material out of these heads just to get the port opening further into the port. Plus I have to use the M1 intake they gave me and it will never go to Max Wedge size. So the opening in the head is way bigger than the intake. No big deal.
So we get all this fixed as best we can, slap a Lunati old school 43712 solid flat tappet cam. No roller, wont pay for it, ok no big deal. This cam is a 261/271 at 50 with a .556/.575" lift with the 1.6 rocker NET(after lash).
Ran it with a Holley 850 carb modified to 1000cfm. So with the 4.150" stroke, 4.440" bore(makes a 514ci), very small valve pockets(the reason why we didnt for the .650" lift cam) we are around 12.7 to 1. Ran good on 110 race fuel, which is what he wanted to run.
Rings will take a while to seat totally, but I think we got him 90% there on the dyno. Made 20 pulls from 3500 on up to peak.
The numbers might surprise some of you. Its not the most powerful 440 stroker, but it ran good considering what I had to deal with.
So what did it make?????
Fist off the crank is BLUE, the rods are BLUE ect. Nice, what the hell am I going to do with all this. The piston pins are all stuck in the pistons, floating pins. Heads are cracked and it has broken keepers and bent valves. Great. Block is burned between 2 cylinders, "Save the block" he says. And its a 440 with a 4.440" bore. "Have to reuse the pistons, so no over bore". And guess what, the bore dont look good. HUGE Dome pistons, 2 F'ed up cams. Well, he has money and he is a good customer, so lets get to work.
Have the block welded and decked, honed the cylinder as best we could without going to big. Maged the crank, no cracks. But its bent and twisted. Fix all that. Replace all the rod bolts and resize the big end. Clean the piston pin bore as best I could, still pretty bad. But the rod bushings are nice, so we have to just go with it.
Calls me to tell me "I got a good deal on some Victor heads, can we use those?" Sure but with those domes you will be 15 to 1!!!! So we chuck the pistons on the mill and start cutting. Domes gone, now we have flat tops. took 56g off the piston! DAMN! Now we rebalance the crank, rods and pistons.
New rings, bearings, cam, lifters. Get the head here and, WTF??? Whoever had them before should not be working on this stuff. Its a Std port Victor, but some ya-hoo decided to "open" them to Max Wedge. Problem is they only opened them about 1" into the port! Now it looks like a trumpet. So I guess I have a bit of grinding to do. I took a LOT of material out of these heads just to get the port opening further into the port. Plus I have to use the M1 intake they gave me and it will never go to Max Wedge size. So the opening in the head is way bigger than the intake. No big deal.
So we get all this fixed as best we can, slap a Lunati old school 43712 solid flat tappet cam. No roller, wont pay for it, ok no big deal. This cam is a 261/271 at 50 with a .556/.575" lift with the 1.6 rocker NET(after lash).
Ran it with a Holley 850 carb modified to 1000cfm. So with the 4.150" stroke, 4.440" bore(makes a 514ci), very small valve pockets(the reason why we didnt for the .650" lift cam) we are around 12.7 to 1. Ran good on 110 race fuel, which is what he wanted to run.
Rings will take a while to seat totally, but I think we got him 90% there on the dyno. Made 20 pulls from 3500 on up to peak.
The numbers might surprise some of you. Its not the most powerful 440 stroker, but it ran good considering what I had to deal with.
So what did it make?????
