Turbocharging a Stock 460 Big Block Ford for Massive (And Affordable) Power

(Pat)>> You're watching Powernation!

(Pat)>> You asked for it and we delivered.

(Frankie)>> Our turbocharged big block Ford puts out maximum power on a minimum budget. [ Music ]

(Pat)>> Here on Engine Power the typical way we make more power is to add a bunch of go fast goodies to an engine. You know, better pistons for more compression, a set of high flowing cylinder heads, bigger camshaft, whatever, but today we're not doing any of that. Today we are gonna make power with a stock style engine the good ole fashioned way and the easy way. By putting boost to it.

(Frankie)>> The stock engine we're gonna be using is this 460 big block Ford. Now this one has been freshly refreshed because we needed a good engine to start with, but it's still using stock components. It has a stock crank that's ten thousandths under on the main and rods, stock connecting rods with stock connecting rod bolts, and a stock style replacement hypereutectic cast piston that's four inch-four-twenty bore. So, it's actually 472 cubic inches. Now don't get hung up on the refresh part because this is something you guys could still do at home with a known good engine of any make or size. The only modification that we have done to the short block is opening up the top ring gap for a little bit of safety under boost.

(Pat)>> The first thing we are gonna do is dyno this engine in its stock form. We have the stock cast iron cylinder heads. We even had a cast iron four barrel intake manifold but prepare to be underwhelmed. These engines did not make a lot of power for their size back in the day, but we are gonna fix it by building an easy turbo system on the dyno and we're gonna see how much power we can make safely, we think, on the stock componentry.

(Frankie)>> Hopefully we don't break it! We're going to try to keep the cost of parts minimal on this build. So, we'll kick off our assembly with a stock style timing set. It's not an adjustable set, but since we don't know the specs on the cam or its intake centerline we're gonna degree the cam and make our own cam card. Our stock replacement cam has durations at 50 thousandths lift of 193 degrees on the intake and 205 degrees on the exhaust. Lobe lift is 251 thousandths on the intake and 274 thousandths on the exhaust. The lobes are set on a 113.5-degree lobe separation angle, and the intake centerline is set at 112 degrees. Not great for high performance but very indicative of a late model flat tappet cam shaft. After spraying Comp Cam's Valvetrain Assembly Spray generously on the timing chain we'll lay down a thin bead of silicone before installing our gasket and a stock style timing cover. Since this timing cover doesn't have any dowels to align it we'll install this front crankshaft counterweight before tightening it down. This piece externally balances the front of the crankshaft, acts as a seal, and spaces out the damper. Now we can install the front woodruff key in the crank snout and press on the stock replacement harmonic damper. The next thing we're gonna be doing is assembling the stock cylinder heads. We're using these because we're trying to keep the costs low. These heads weren't designed to make a bunch of power. They were designed for better emissions. So don't get too crazy with your expectations. A few specs on them. They have a two inch intake valve and a 1-680 exhaust that are housed in a 100cc combustion chamber, which isn't great for building compression but under forced induction that's not necessarily a bad thing. The intake port does not have impressive flow numbers, but we did flow it on our SF-750 Superflow flow bench. Now it flows 217 c-f-m at 500 lift. Again, not impressive but this head wasn't designed to make big power. It was designed for a very specific purpose back in the day. Under forced induction that's gonna be okay and we should be able to make pretty decent power with our turbocharger. The only thing we are gonna be doing is upgrading the valve springs. That's because the stock springs have less than 80 pounds of seat pressure on them, and under boost that's gonna be even less. So that's not really gonna work in our application and we're gonna be upgrading them with a set of Comp single springs. They'll have 103 pounds on the seat and 290 pounds open. We got the matching retainers and 10 degree locks to go with them. We'll get our heads assembled, and then we can get them bolted on the engine. After placing one 60 thousandths shim under each spring we'll use our Goodson pneumatic valve spring compressor to install the new springs, retainers, and locks on the stock valves.

(Pat)>> With the intention of adding boost we're gonna be using a set of Fel Pro Perma-torque severe duty head gaskets with a 4-500 bore and a 45 thousandths compressed thickness. We found ours at Summit Racing Equipment. Each of these cast iron heads weighs over 60 pounds, and they're held in place by 10 nine-sixteenths diameter head bolts. With engine oil on the threads, they are torqued in three stages to 140 pound feet. Up next, what can you do when the parts just don't fit? Look for an adapter.

(Pat)>> For this build we're using a Melling high volume oil pump with a stock replacement oil pump driveshaft. A new oil pump pickup is always a good idea on a fresh build. This one came with the oil pump and is matched to a stock eight and a quarter inch deep front sump oil pan. Just like every build we'll measure the clearance between the pickup and the bottom of the oil pan. Ours is great at five-sixteenths of an inch. With silicone on the critical sealing surfaces a one piece oil pan gasket can drop on. A little more silicone in the corners is followed by the oil pan. We'll tighten the oil pan bolts down all the way to the compression stocks in the gasket. In the spirit of keeping everything as stock as possible we opted to run a mechanical water pump instead of the normal electric one we would run on the dyno, and to do that we jumped on our phones on the AutoZone Pro Mobile app and picked up a brand new one from Duralast. And when I say brand new this is 100 percent brand new. They start with a precision casting that they designed, and they machine for an exact fit in its o-e-m application. It also includes a new shaft, new hub, new bearings, seals, and even a new impeller. It is 100 percent factory tested to ensure that it meets or exceeds its o-e-m specifications, and that's why we chose to run it on our project. On Ford engines some bolts go into a water or oil passage. So, sealer is used on them. To make sure we have the right length fasteners we're using a Scott Drake water pump bolt kit.

(Frankie)>> After lubing the lifter bores we can slide in these stock replacement flat tappet lifters. It's crucial that they can spin freely in the bores and that they have camshaft assembly lube on the bottom face.

(Pat)>> Stock o-e-m replacement pushrods are next. Pedestal style non-adjustable stamp steel rocker arms came stock on the 460. They have a 1.75 factory ratio, and they are torqued to 22-pound feet.

(Frankie)>> If you remember when we started this project we said we wanted to keep it as stock as possible, and we even wanted to run a stock cast iron carbureted manifold, and we were gonna use this one that we had in house. We were gonna do that up until we figured out it actually won't work, and here's why. It's something that we didn't realize, but when Ford switched from the carbureted to the e-f-i version of the 460 they actually changed the port design on the heads. Although any manifold will bolt up to either of the heads the ports don't line up. The carbureted version has a lower port that's more oval and less round. The e-f-i version is moved up over half an inch, and if you try and put a carbureted manifold on an e-f-i head the ports will overhang into the valley, and that simply won't run. So, there's two ways you can get around that.

(Pat)>> You can either build or buy a set of adapter plates to run an old school manifold on that e-f-i port, but we decided to go a different route which we think is better. We picked up an original 460 e-f-i intake manifold. Now this definitely has some advantages. One, the ports will actually line up with the e-f-i ports. Two, it is made out of aluminum. It is literally over 30 pounds lighter than our cast iron piece and a little bit easier to work with. The only real difference is how the throttle body bolts to the intake manifold. This is Ford's specific design for their e-f-i setup, but we want to run a conventional 41-50 style four barrel like on our cast iron unit. So, we picked up an adapter from Price Motorsports Engineering, and that adapts a four barrel to this flange. It's a complete kit that came with the adapter, gaskets, plugs for the injector holes, and mounting bolts. It does look a little funky and it has a designation of exactly how it goes onto the manifold. So, we're excited to see what happens.

(Frankie)>> In the spirit of keeping this engine as stock as possible we even got a set of stock cast iron used manifolds for the exhaust. This isn't gonna make a ton of power, but it's still gonna be a lot of fun and it's gonna be exciting to see how much power it makes.

(Pat)>> We got it all off the internet machine.

(Frankie)>> We'll put some green bearing adhesive on these brass injector plugs and pound them in with a used socket. The intake gaskets are held in place with weatherstrip adhesive. Black r-t-v in the corners and on the China walls will seal up the intake. The intake manifold bolts are torqued to 30-pound feet. A bead of silicone goes on the valve cover rail to seal up these valve cover adapters we got off the internet. We couldn't find stock e-f-i valve covers, and these will allow us to run conventional old school valve covers on our 460.

(Pat)>> The manifold is topped off with a 41-50 carb adapter. We got a stock replacement distributor from RockAuto dot com, and for our application we chose to lock it out completely. [ ratchet clicking ]

(Pat)>> We'll put the exhaust manifolds on in their normal orientation for now, but that is gonna change.

(Frankie)>> Up next, the big block gets a turbo system on the cheap.

(Pat)>> And then it lays down the boost on the dyno.

(Frankie)>> We modified the stock distributor plug to work with our MSD offroad box. We'll be using our dyno proven QFT Black Diamond 750 c-f-m carburetor. Because the engine has a flat tappet cam we need to break in the engine using Comp Cams' 10-W-30 break-in oil. It has high ZDDP content to protect the cam and lifters.

(Pat)>> We'll run the engine for 30 minutes, varying the r-p-m to establish a good wear pattern on all of the valvetrain components. After that we'll drain the break-in oil, remove the oil filter and cut it apart, and look for any indication of premature wear. Our filter looks great! Finally, we'll refill the engine with 10-W-30 muscle car and street rod engine oil from Comp Cams. Everything looked great after break-in. So now we've made a few pulls on it varying some timing and messing with the carburetor. We think we've got it pretty close and it's gonna make some decent power for what it is.

(Frankie)>> This one is completely stock besides the adapter and the 41-50 carburetor. So, it's not gonna make peak power really high in the r-p-m range. So, we're just gonna turn it from 2,000 to 4,500 and it should make both peaks within that.

(Pat)>> Stock-a-licous is what this is!

(Frankie)>> It's loading right in at 2,000.

(Pat)>> Good carburetor is why.

(Frankie)>> That's more than I thought. [ engine revving ]

(Pat)>> Man, is that romping stomping or what?

(Frankie)>> I think that's more than the factory.

(Pat)>> 295 horsepower.

(Frankie)>> 460.4-pound feet at 2,900.

(Pat)>> Almost one per cube because this is a little bigger. Now this thing has a boatload of manifold vacuum. 3.3 and 3.4 inches of manifold vacuum.

(Frankie)>> It doesn't have a ton of c-f-m going through it. So, we know it's not really the carburetor. At 4,500 it has 454 c-f-m going through it. So that' s just a restrictive intake track, and there's not much you're gonna do about that without changing parts.

(Pat)>> There's one thing you can do with a restrictive intake track. You could force feed it some artificial atmosphere.

(Frankie)>> I think it's time for that. I'm just excited!

(Pat)>> Halfway done.

(Frankie)>> To make routing the turbo system easier we'll swap the exhaust manifolds from side to side so they exit to the front. To support the weight of our turbocharger we hand built this bracket from eighth inch steel. This turbo, along with all of the turbo components, came from Summit Racing Equipment, and it has a 78 millimeter compressor wheel and a 75 millimeter turbine wheel. The oil feed and return hoses are made with Earl's line and fittings. To route the exhaust to the turbo we used our Forney mig and tig welders to make this exhaust system from aluminized and stainless steel. [ Music ] Boost will be controlled with two Summit Racing 50 millimeter waste gates. [ ratchet clicking ]

(Frankie)>> Since we're going forced induction we could have put e-f-i on this engine, but keeping with the theme of keeping the costs low wanted to convert one of our carburetors to blow through. This is pretty simple and something you can do to any 41-50 carburetor. The main modifications that we made to our QFT 750 Black Diamond is removing the power valve protection check valve on the bottom of the carburetor because if boost gets underneath the throttle blades and closes it, it will close the power valve and restrict fuel flow to the engine, which could be bad. We also made sure that it had nitrophyl floats in both bowls, and changed out the 30cc accelerator pumps for 50s so that we have more fuel flow on transition and stronger accelerator pump arms. The biggest change that we made is increasing the jetting because we wanted to make sure that we had enough fuel flow to support our power level. So after punching in all the numbers into our super computer we ended up taking an educated guess, and it should be pretty safe for our power level.

(Pat)>> We had two identical 750 Black Diamonds. So we'll simply swap the naturally aspirated one for the blow through conversion carb. Just for the dyno we rigged up a simple intercooler system from pieces we found lying around. With that our turbo system is complete. Speaking of turbo chargers here's a quick look at how they work.

(Frankie)>> Turbochargers are forced induction devices that use exhaust energy to cram more air flow into an engine. Exhaust pressure from the engine drives the blades of a turbine wheel before it discharges. On the other side an aluminum impeller wheel draws in and compresses fresh air. These wheels ride on a close tolerance shaft that can spin well over 100,000 r-p-m. Up next, there's nothing more fun than flirting with disaster in the dyno cell.

(Pat)>> This is finally what we've been waiting for. We have our 460 fired up. The turbo system is on and running good. We made a few preliminary pulls and the engine does not want to run above 3,000 the way it was, and we tracked it down to having a problem with our stock distributor. It didn't like what we were doing. So we ended up switching out to an MSD Pro Billet that we had on the shelf, and we made up another set of wires for it. Problem solved. So now what we're gonna do is run the engine in the same r-p-m range that we did but we're gonna sneak a little bit of boost to her and see what happens. The timing is at 28 degrees just for safety purposes, and because of pump gas as well.

(Frankie)>> 2,000 to 4,500 at 300 a second, and hopefully this time we'll have a little boost.

(Pat)>> I hear it! Boost right there! [ engine revving ]

(Pat)>> Woo!

On a stock engine, and we're pretty close on there. 422 horsepower, 639-pound feet of torque.

(Frankie)>> We've got to up the temp, but the more we dyno it the more it's gonna make cause all the tubing gets hot, the turbo gets hot, and it'll make boost a little bit earlier. You want to make another one?

(Pat)>> Let's make another one.

(Frankie)>> We'll just back that one up.

(Pat)>> Giddy like a schoolboy.

(Frankie)>> Stock stuff's always fun. 500-pound feet at 2,000.

(Pat)>> Whoa! Look at that peak right there. 655-pound feet of torque, which that's what it's gonna do. 442 horsepower! How much power do you think a stock 460 will take?

(Frankie)>> The crank will probably take a good amount. We're not loading the rod bolts themselves. We're loading the rod by compressing it, but I feel like it could take a good amount. The big thing that would worry me is the hypereutectic piston. We don't want to get this thing too spicy where it starts to detonate and crack a piston or just simply have too much force for it.

(Pat)>> That's not gonna prevent me from putting timing in it though. I'm gonna put a little bit of timing in it. I'm gonna put two degrees in it and we'll go from there. We're gonna be very conservative. Pump gas, stock componentry, a bolt down rocker arm, a 190 something, a 50 cam in it.

(Frankie)>> The cool thing is this is relatively economical. We only have a couple of grand in the turbo system. That turbo's under $500 dollars and it performs perfectly. [ engine revving ]

(Pat)>> Just a skosh more boost is all, seven and a half pounds of boost.

(Frankie)>> 444.9, need your glasses for that, and 656.8. That's at 3,400! Those are diesel numbers right there.

(Pat)>> We're all done at 4,500. I don't know if we dynoed an engine this low before.

(Frankie)>> Especially not at this power level. This is diesel-ine!

(Pat)>> What is it, diesel-ine? That's very strange.

(Frankie)>> Didn't seem to pick up a ton with the timing. I don't know if we want to push it and put any more in it. It only picked up a little bit.

(Pat)>> You know what I think we should do?

(Frankie)>> I can't believe you're about to say this.

(Pat)>> Let's put some clicks in it. Get your boost-T kicking. I'm a total turbo guy!

(Frankie)>> We'll put a boost-T in it.

(Pat)>> Here is where we're gonna be hero or zero because we've added a little bit of boost to it, click wise. Not sure how much it will. Probably a pound or two I would think, but we're very worried about a cast piston, and the stock connecting rod, and all the associated stock goodies on this thing. In the spirit of science and discovery we're gonna see what it does.

(Frankie)>> None of the parts in this engine were ever designed to make this much power. We're really pushing the limit. [ engine revving ]

(Pat)>> Load in! [ engine revving ]

(Pat)>> It broke 700-pound feet!

(Frankie)>> What the hell! Oh my gosh!

(Pat)>> 724-pound feet.

(Frankie)>> Nine and a half pounds of boost!

(Pat)>> 494 horsepower.

(Frankie)>> We're flirting with disaster at this point but it's cool. We can do it, and on the dyno we can control it really well, but I don't know if I would turn it up this much if you were using it on the street.

(Pat)>> I don't think so. We always get the comment of why don't you push one until it blows? I don't want to push one until it blows. Mechanical things happen.

(Frankie)>> Nobody wants to blow up a perfectly good engine and have to clean up the mess.

(Pat)>> You don't want to junk it out, and this thing's idling at 750 r-p-m. It doesn't know it has a turbo on it right now.

(Frankie)>> Until it gets into boost it drives around just like it would n/a, and when it gets into boost, that's gonna move some stuff. All below 4,500 with that much torque. Peak torque at 3,500 and peak power it looks like 3,700 or 3,800.

(Pat)>> It's the diesel-ine! Whatever you want to call it. If you had a decent running engine you could do this very setup on it. Very affordable turbo, simple system. Our intercooler works good. Nice job!

(Frankie)>> If you want to see more cool tech like this go check out Powernation.