383 Stroker

Hey, it's great to have you back here in the Horsepower shop. You know, cars like this 71 Z 28 are a big reason why the small block Chevy is one of the most popular performance engines of all time. Of course, there's plenty of reason for that. There are a lot of parts and plenty of engine build ups for almost any application.

You can blow it or you can even spray it. Yeah. And before that you can stroke it. In fact, that's our agenda today in the horsepower shop, we're gonna take you through the paces of building a 383 Stroker engine.

And for us, well, it's sort of a exercise and recycling horsepower that began when we started building up our Nova.

When we removed the Nova's 350 small block to make way for our new 572. We had ourselves a perfectly good candidate for a Stroker build up.

We decided to launch our Stroker project at Groom's engines in Nashville where the engine first goes through a complete tear down process.

And then after baking at 650 degrees, it's rotated and shot blasted

before magni

to ensure there are no hidden cracks.

Line. Honing is the first machining step. This establishes the crank center line

because it's going to be a Stroker. The bottom of the board needs notching with a die

grinder.

The cylinder walls, the board perpendicular with the crank with the CNC machine set at 30,000.

Next, the deck services zero parallel to the crank center line

and the cylinder walls are

honed with a cross hatch finish to allow proper travel of oil.

Meanwhile, the crank and rotating assembly are balanced on this machine.

After all, the machining, there's a bath and anti

corrosive liquid and our Stroker block gets new freeze plugs cam bearings and the trip back to the shop.

Well, here's our block back from the machine shop. Now check this out,

you can see where they've clearance the block right here

and here for additional crank clearance. Plus we've already gone ahead and added the A RP studs right here on the mains for more strength. Of course, before you begin assembling any engine, you wanna make sure you give it a good hot bath with plenty of soapy water, then blow everything dry and wipe all your machine surfaces down

a little bit of light oil to keep from rusting. Now, if you'll follow me over here to the table, I'm gonna show you the guts to our Stroker motor

to keep things simple. We ordered our whole kit from Eagle specialty products. In fact, we ordered their race kit which includes some pretty cool parts starting with this 4340 steel crank.

Now, all the journals have been micro polished, the oilers have been tampered and the filets are radius.

It also comes with a pretty cool set of rods. Just check these out there, an H beam design made from 4340 Molly and the small ends have been bush for those floaters while the big ends have these A RP cap screws for additional strength.

The pistons are a forged flat top design with dual valve reliefs here

and we're gonna fill them out with a set of chrome Molly rings. And the kit also comes with some premium bearings.

Hey, those are some pretty serious parts for our Stroker build up. But I know what some of you guys are thinking right now.

Hey, I want a punched out motor without punching a hole in my wallet. Well, Eagle also has this more affordable Stroker kit

that features a cast iron crank, which is a good piece, some hyper

etic pistons like this and high performance I beam rods. Of course, you also get the bearings and rings

and the trade off for the savings as well. You'll have to limit the engine speed to about 5500 RPM. And if you opt for a power adder, take it easy on that nitrous or boost.

Well, I've just finished dropping in our crank shaft and of course, this is the real heart of any Stroker kit.

Now, you get more displacement out of your engine by making the pistons move further up and down the cylinders. And in this case, a stock 350 stroke is 3.48 inches and we've just taken it out to 3.75 inches or just a little bit more than a quarter of an inch.

Now, we're about ready to bolt on our main caps and of course, you always wanna make sure that you have plenty of assembly lube

before you bolt them down. Now, I like this max tough stuff that we get from Royal Purple

while Chuck torched down the mains over there. I thought I'd do him a little favor and assemble our rods and pistons.

Of course, these pistons use floating pins

that stay put. Thanks to the spiral locks.

There we go.

Now, before I install them though, I gotta show you something really trick. Here's the way you can build any kind of engine imaginable and

dyno it right in your own computer. Now, I've already loaded up this dyno Sim software and the laptop here and let me show you how easy it is.

You just pick your components from a complete built in library or enter your own custom specs. Then you can pull up dyno results complete with a graph and a table just like the real thing with our combination. We should make about 403 horsepower at 5500 RPM. S

435

pounds of torque at 4500.

And this way you can try out all sorts of combinations before you spend the time or the money. Now. That's a cool product. But you know what, it's time for us to take a little bit of a break, make some money for our sponsors, but we're gonna be back to work on our big inch small block right after this.

Hey, let's give it a little more compression here. See what happens.

Hey, I told you we'd be hard at work on our 383 here when you came back to join us. In fact, we've been hard at work putting the pistons in. We got everyone I'm in here except for this last one. I'm gonna use it to show you a little bit of a trick

when I'm assembling an engine. I like to give plenty of oil to the rings here.

Throw a little bit here on the skirts

and that'll keep everything lubed up real well.

Now you also wanna put some assembly lube down here on the bearing.

There we go.

And then we can just square the thing up in our ring compressor.

Yeah, that looks pretty good

and drop the piston in the hole.

Then you can torque the rod bolts down

to 63 ft pounds.

We use that dinosaur software to check out some different cam profiles and what we came up with won't give us maximum horse power. But what we give up on the upper RPM range, we get back down lower. We can use it.

This is one of comp cam's extreme energy hydraulic rollers and it specs out at 230 on the intake 236 on the exhaust and both were checked at 50,000 slit. There you go. Oh, by the way, speaking of lift, this thing is gonna bump the valves at 510 on the intake 520 on the exhaust.

And this is a pretty sweet little cam here. And if you were listening to Joe speck this thing out, you're probably wondering to yourself right now, why is there more lift and duration on the exhaust side? And you know what? That's a pretty good question. In fact, what happens is during every combustion cycle, there's always some residual that remains in the combustion chamber. And what this camshaft does is it improves the efficiency of the exhaust side to more completely evacuate the combustion chamber. Now, what that does though is it clears the way for a nice clean incoming charge of fuel and air and that is gonna help you make more power

very good points. And while you finish installing that cam shaft, I wanna show you the timing set that works with it.

This is a double roller set up. We got with the rest of our valve train

and it's got three key ways on the crate sprocket here that allows us to install at four degrees advanced four retarded or in our case straight up. Let's get busy.

Hey, look at here, first time.

I don't know if you're good or just lucky, but this is the cam button that's gonna keep the camshaft from walking forward

and retaining plates

and we load her down.

Yeah, I gotta admit it pretty good idea. You're getting this two piece timing cover. Yeah. Now what that's gonna do is allow us to make camshaft timing changes or even swap out the entire cam shaft

without removing the oil pan. Now, speaking of that, this is the oil pan that we're gonna be using on our Stroker here. It's a seven court side kick out piece from Moroso.

Now it gives us the extra capacity we need without losing any ground clearance and check this out on the inside. It has an integral baffle right here.

That's gonna help keep the oil down in the sump where it does the most good.

Oh, and here's another important feature you see these little stamp notches right here. Well, those are going to give us the extra clearance we need for that big Stroker.

Now, you're also gonna need one of these special pickups here that I've already installed on one of their blueprinted oil pumps. Oh, check this out. Great idea. It's a one piece oil pan gasket. It'll help prevent leaks here in the corner that usually happen there, check this out too.

They have compression stops that help you keep from over torquing the boats. And this thing also comes from Mr Gasket.

This metal pump shaft ought to give us a little more peace of mind.

There we go.

Got you.

Well, that about wraps it up for the short block. But, you know, now would be a great time to get some Chevy Orange paint on the block here before there's too much stuff to mask off. And that's a great job for you. Well, you know, since I bleed Chevy orange, I think I'll just squeeze a little out of my veins here into the spray. Can I bet you could?

Well, Chuck bleeds on his block over there. Let me show you the heads. We're gonna bolt on our Stroker.

Now, these are aluminum castings we got from Jegs. They feature 1 97 cc intake runners that dump into 2055 valves. And that's gonna give us some killer mid range for that 383 and work well, with the cam shaft we chose. Now the combustion chambers measure 72 ccs

and that's gonna give us about a nine and three quarter to one compression ratio.

The exhaust valves measure 160

both the intake and exhaust valves are stainless over here. We've got guide plates, screw and studs and springs that'll handle up to a 740 lift.

We'll seal up our cylinders with Mr gasket ultra seals

and we torch the heads down with some A RP bolts. Well, I hate to uh, throw a wrench in the works here, but we need to take a little bit of a break, but we're gonna be right back and we're gonna finish up our 383 Stroker right after this

man. This is looking good.

Welcome back to horsepower where we're putting the final touches on our 33 Stroker Chevy here.

Well, it looks like the rest of the comp valve train is just about ready to go back in place. But I wanna show you something first. Our block didn't come from the factory with roller lifters. So the ones that we're using rely on this spreader bar here to keep everything in the proper position. Now, you just wanna dip in oil first

before dropping them in the lifter bores.

We're using one piece chrome Molly push rods to actuate our rockers

which are pro magnum stainless pieces with a 152 ratio

Polly locks come with the rockers to help them keep their adjustment.

Our Stroker motor is gonna make good power up to 6500 RPM. So we need an intake manifold to match our head and cam combination

El

Brock's RPM. Air gap is a dual plane design that meets our needs and we like the runner design that isolates the runner from the heat of engine oil for a cooler denser charge.

Hey, I got my intake gaskets lay down there. Uh Chef, man, I'm way ahead of you. In fact, I even brought the manifold bolts and a little bit of anise.

Now you are gonna tighten these in a crisscross fashion, aren't you? I thought I would. Yeah. Good job.

You know, carburetors are a lot like cam shafts. Most people tend to buy way more than what they need. So, when the folks at Barry Grant told me that the Road Demon 650 with vacuum Secondaries was more than enough to feed our 3d 3 Stroker. Well, I was a little bit skeptical,

still am,

but then they went on to tell me that they

carburetors flow about 10% more than what they're actually rated at. And

well, regardless of that fact, these things make a lot of sense for us. For instance, they've got dual fuel inlets, a nice site gauge here right in the bowl to help you set the fuel float levels and electric choke and easy access that allows us to adjust the opening rate for the vacuum. Secondaries.

Hey, nice touch. They do look good.

Any high performance engine needs a high performance ignition. This time we're going with an MS D set up that includes their pro billet distributor,

A six A L box and a blaster two coil. This system works with multiple spark strikes that fire throughout 20 degrees of crank rotation for each cylinder. Of course, that spark originates here with the coil puts out 45,000 volts and from there, of course, to the distributor

and this one uses a high output magnetic pickup to trigger the system. Now, it ends here, of course with the wires. And this time we thought we'd go with a set of these Taylor Pro race wires that measure 10.4 millimeters in diameter. They got a spiral core that'll suppress RF interference

with number one cylinder at top dead center drop in distributor,

then install the cap

and the wires.

Hey, good job partner. You know, we almost have this thing ready to go to the

dyno shop,

you know, but first we gotta finish installing this balancer here, which is a TCI rattler.

Now, what this thing does, it helps control engine vibrations to extend the life of both the crank shaft and the bearings. And as we all know, a more efficient engine makes more power. Plus if you're a racer,

you'll also be glad to know that this thing meets sf I specs.

Well, I suspect that engine is not gonna run too long without a water pump. We plan to put some serious street miles on our Stroker here. So circulation is very important.

I found this aluminum pump from Jegs for under 70 bucks that well gets the job done, takes a little weight off the front end

and it won't break our budget.

Hey, speaking of breaks, we need to take one.

But when Joe comes back. Guess what? He's gonna have this thing strapped to the dyno.

He's gonna run it and run some numbers for you. Hey, aren't you coming too? No, he

uh

I need to go see a man about a mustang. Right? Sure.

Welcome back to Horsepower and the COP CAMS headquarters in Memphis, Tennessee.

This is a place where years of experience in manufacturing cam shafts and other valve train components

along with the latest in technology combined to give racers a winning edge.

Just about every kind of competition

from NASCAR to NHRA

racers rely on the precision machining and testing of comp components.

A big part of the success story though is research.

This spin,

for example, uses a laser inside an engine cylinder

to study every element of valve trained behavior.

The nice thing about the laser

is it can trace the motion of the valve at 2000 RPM or at 10,000 RPM

and it tells us exactly what's happening at the valve. And that's what's most important. We can design everything around the cam and the tap it. But what we need to know is what's really happening at the valve because that's where the performance comes from.

And the spin tr tells us exactly what the valve is doing.

So this ought to be a great place to put our Stroker motor to the ultimate test here at the engine

dyno.

Now, remember the

dyno software said we should make 403 horsepower, about 435 ft pounds of torque.

Let's see if we're about ready to make a pull.

Hey, Mike Brown,

got those valves running yet. We're about ready. Ok. What else you got to do before we're ready for a pool? All we have to do is finish adjusting the vows. Install the valve covers, install the plug wires and this baby is ready to run.

Mike makes several runs on our 383 Stroker until he's satisfied that we've got the best performance possible.

Mike. That sounded like the status run yet. What's the verdict here? Well, Joe looks like we got 405 horsepower at 5500 RPM. S and 442 ft pounds of torque at 4400.

Well, they said the

dyno don't lie. In this case, both of them did a

great job.

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Of course, leave it to me to come up with something for you. Mustang guys. How about Flow Master's new three inch cat back system for your 99 to 03 Cobra.

Now it features their new scavenger crossover pipe for more power in the upper RPM range. 40 series mufflers, Ium

man,

bit tubing. And hey, how about those massive four inch stainless tips? Oh, here's a tip from a fellow Mustang maniac. All this extra horsepower. It's gonna cost you about 520. Well, you know, it's been fun, uh, horsing around with you today, but we're gonna have to saddle up and Mosey out of here. We'll catch you next time.