Horsepower On A Budget - By The Numbers

With the short-block assembled, Bob turned to installing the stock-style cylinder heads. Today, the better the heads, the more power. But that all comes with a price. For a good performing street engine such as this a basic set of small port, big combustion chamber castings are enough. With all new parts including stainless 2.02-inch intake and 1.60-inch exhaust valves there will be plenty of torque to get your car moving fast.

Another area Bob is vocal about is sealing. Many who assemble their own engine forget or don't realize to seal the threads of the head bolts that go through into a small-block's water-jacket. If you don't do this the potential for a leak that will eventually lead to a blown head gasket is pretty good.

This package came with hydraulic cam and lifters. To let the lifters fill up with oil you can let them sit in a tin can filled with 30-weight overnight. But in this case, Bob used an oil pump primer in an electric drill. This gave the oil pump enough time to prime all the oil passageways.

As for making sure the tips of the pushrods are lubed before assembly, a little dab of assembly grease works here.

As critical as making sure everything inside the engine is lubricated properly, is doing your best to prevent leaks. Here, with the intake gaskets in place over the ports Bob uses common RTV silicone sealer in a tube to create the intake manifold's end gaskets.

Proper installation of the manifold is a must and letting the silicone set up is important. The polished aluminum dual plane intake manifold used on our engine was designed for a Holley four-barrel.

Note the trick intake manifold offset washers used. With slotted middle holes for use with different cylinder head combinations, these washer inserts allow the bolts to correctly tighten down the manifold and hold it to the head.

Here it is. This is what you get for around $1,800. This near-complete engine features all new (pistons, bearings, cam and lifters, etc.) or machined parts (such as crank, rods, block, and heads), plus a few aftermarket performance parts like the aluminum high-rise intake, balancer and chrome timing cover. For the money you can't beat kits like this, especially if you want to build it yourself.

For our test engine we added a cool HEI distributor from MSD. This item is a basic bolt in and not only looks great but has the spark to help put down some potent horsepower numbers.

Although this type of engine was pretty non-responsive to carb changes, depending on what application you are going to use it in (manual trans, automatic, heavy car, etc.) you could get away with a number of different fuel meters. For the dyno session Bob chose to use a Carb Shop-prepped 650-cfm double pumper. However, a vacuum secondary 600 would probably be just as responsive and perhaps even save you a little on the gas bill.

When all was said and done, we definitely hit the number. While there was no predetermined horsepower figure we were looking for, we'd have to say that for the money (or lack of) we hit a home run with a best pull of just under 320 hp and right at 370 lb-ft of torque. And when we looked at the dyno sheets and saw low oil and water temps, great vacuum, and low fuel consumption, we could only think of one number-and it was the winning one.