Dyno Testing a Mondello 455 Olds Big Block

Today on horsepower, we'll tear into these parts and finish a monumental muscle car motor.

Now, it won't be your father's Oldsmobile. It'll be a 455 fit for big numbers on the dyno.

A couple of weeks ago, we stripped down a well worn olds. 455 we picked up at a bone yard.

We took our block to Mandela's tech center for a complete machining where we also had the crank balanced

and the stock rods resized for use with new pistons.

Then doctor

S himself stepped in for a basic clean up porting of our new heads

and to divert the block for better oiling.

After knocking in new cam bearings, they installed a new hydraulic roller cam.

They installed oil restrictors in the main bearings to improve the 450 five's infamous oiling problems before dropping in our stock crank shaft.

Manello tweaked the new piston rings with a touch of grinding

and a little smoothing with a special stone.

Then after installing them on our new pistons and refurbished rods, he put them into our 450 fives block,

followed by ac

green

at four cylinders.

The last pieces to go on were our new oil pump and pick up

our original goal was to salvage as many original parts as possible, including this front cover. Now, once we get this thing on, we can button up the bottom end

before you install a new pan on your project motor. You wanna make sure you have enough clearance between the pickup and the bottom of the pan. Here's a quick rundown of how to do it.

Use a straight edge on the bottom of the pickup and measure from the bottom of the straight edge to the pan rail.

Then measure the pan's depth

using the straight edge as well.

Add an eighth of an inch for the gasket and you should have between 3/8 to a half an inch of clearance.

Then after laying a beat of silicone down, we can put our front and rear seals in place.

Next, we can lay our Mr gasket ultra seals in place

and drop on the oil pan, which is a seven quart pan made by Moroso for the 455.

Before anything else though, Mike's gonna paint this motor's bottom and give it a touch of nostalgia. Classic olds gold. Of course,

we're using a cast iron mechanical water pump. We got from o'reilly Auto Parts store.

Next, we'll install the balancer. We got from pioneer.

If you saw our show a couple weeks ago, you caught a glimpse of these

brock performer RPM heads for the 455.

They've got combustion chambers that spec out at 77 CCS. Valves are 2 19 1 88 and well, these things make really good power right out of the box. But as we saw at Mandela's Place,

there's always room for improvement.

These guys don't allow any heads to leave the building without a little tweaking,

rubbing out the combustion chamber valve pockets in our case

and polishing them to a smooth finish surface.

Again, these heads are ready to use right out of the box. But a three angle valve job is assurance.

The valves will seat well and flow freely

on the flow bench

as well as when they're installed on the motor.

So about the only thing we could do to these heads is port match the gaskets. But

man, these things are dead on. So

let's go ahead and install this thing

gaskets on.

And so is the hit

since these botos are blind, we just need a little bit of a RP assembly lube on the threads of these bolts.

We're torquing these heads in three sequences, 30 50

75 ft pounds center out.

If you use 30 weight motor oil on the threads though the final torque setting is 85.

Here's an important little piece you don't wanna leave out on these Oldsmobiles. It's a splash guard that goes down in the Lifter valley. Now, what it does is it keeps any oil from splashing off of the camshaft onto the bottom of the intake manifold because what that does is it heats up the intake and the fuel and air coming in and robs horsepower.

We've been soaking our comp hydraulic lifters about eight or nine hours now and

I'd say they're ready to go in.

You know, it's a funny thing, but on the website forums, about half the guys insist on pre pumping the lifters before installation. And

well, if you've never done this, you take a push rod,

then you just push down on the plunger until all the air bubbles are gone.

That means the lifter is full of oil.

Well, most manufacturers like comp discouraged pre pumping saying that the litter full of oil will cause the valve to open during lashing.

Well,

I don't wanna hate mail so I'm not telling you what we do

next. We can drop in our push rods

and remember to clean them up before you do that

for rockers. We're using comps, aluminum ultra golds. Now we got ours with a 1.6 ratio

to adjust them. Work one cylinder at a time with each lifter on the base circle of the cam.

Tighten the poly lock until you get all the slack out with a little bit of resistance. Now you're at zero lash

next turn, the poly lock just under a half turn. Now tighten the set screw and use the T handle to lock them down into place. This will give you the ideal preload of the rocker arm, push rod and lifter.

Even though it's nice, you don't need a special tool like this to get this job done. All you need is a wrench and an Allen or a Bob. If you've got one laying around, hey, we'll see you in a minute. We gotta take a break.

We're back with our old build. And now with this aluminum intake, I remember a time back in the seventies when the 455 was in its heyday that

about the only thing I had aluminum was the foil on my TV, rabbit ears.

Anyway, this Edelbrock performer, a vast improvement over the cast iron original.

It's a dual plane low rise design. It made to give you plenty of torque over a broad power range

and plenty of throttle response from off

to 5500 RPM.

They recommend a quarter inch beat of silicone to make the seal.

And that's because the rubber and quart gaskets. Well, they can get oil soaked. And what happens is the current case, pressure from the engine will push the seals out from under the intake manifold. And that's where you get into end seal slippage,

take your time with it. You don't wanna have to do it twice. Now, we're not gonna torque it down now. And here's why

we get email questions from time to time about torque specs and sequences. And, well, each situation is different depending on whether you're dealing with cast iron or aluminum or whether you're putting motor oil on the threads or assembly lube or nothing at all. And, well, it's no big secret. You just go to the manufacturer's website. In our case, Edelbrock has this diagram of the 455

and it shows torquing from the outside in that moves the gasket inward a little bit helps prevent water jacket leaks which occur on the outside.

These pretty rocker arms match our blocks so much. I almost hate to cover them up.

Catch. There's been another cover up here. No one told us, Chris from extreme, knows his way around. Engines. We're gonna try him out and see exactly what he can do. Is this the right motor plate?

Let's make him feel extremely at home.

Yeah.

You ever drive anything before? Uh, forget the jams. But let's keep Chris,

we're bolting up a set of head and long tubes with inch and three quarter primaries that dump into a three inch collector. Now they fit the olds 404 25 and our 455

you probably noticed these fasteners look a little different than normal and that's because they are check this out.

They're friction lock fasteners from Percy. And what they do is cut two grooves in the end of the threaded portion of the bolt. And what that does is it allows this Allen set screw with the leg to expand the end of the bolt once it's tight

and that way you won't have a leaky hitter

since it's a 38 bolt, torque it to 28 ft pounds.

Then using an eight inch allen, tighten the set screw

to feed our olds. We're using this Summit 750 CFM square board four barrel. Now, this thing has mechanical secondaries and a manual choke. Now, this is the same carve we used on our 460 for a while back and it worked really good. So now we're gonna see how it does on a more performance based platform

over the past couple of years. A lot of questions and concerns have popped up about where protection and engines, especially during flat tap it can break in. Now, the EPA has figured out that ZDDP and phosphorus and motor oils can destroy catalytic converters and emission systems, hence more pollution. Now, the downfall to all this is phosphorus and zinc are the two main active ingredients in oil that fight wear protection.

And without it, it's extremely fatal with flat tap at cams and lifters.

Now, since we're working on an Oldsmobile, Joe Mandela wants us to run this, it's a special formula that's added to motor oil. So we know we're gonna have a safe break in.

Now, all of these products still contain zinc and phosphorus and I think the scientists will have a hard time finding anything better.

Did we put fuel in the tank? No, the gas cans are sitting out there.

All right.

Here we go. All right.

No.

All right. That's why retarded

PLS aren't that wet either.

That's why

pump the turn on

fuel will help

d di

di I know

that's what I get for. Laughing at Chris. But then again,

Chris,

I didn't do it.

It's just,

oh,

I did do

when we finally did get our heads out to where the sun does shine.

We were able to start it up,

get the timing in the ballpark. Too

much back off

right there

and then kill a few mosquitoes.

Yeah, it sounds like it's choking out when it goes back to idle.

Yeah,

before we go any further though, I wanna make sure the top end is getting oil.

That's getting oil

sweet.

All right, we're gonna fire it back up and let it run,

breaking in a flat tap at cam is like heart surgery, do it right the first time and you avoid a lot of problems.

Now, we're running the Olds at 2000 RPM. How

long does that take?

20 minutes

and then stepping up to 2500 for 10 minutes?

Hallelujah. Finally,

finally, that sounds pretty good.

Yeah, man. I'm really, really impressed at the throttle response of it.

That sound, it does sound really mean at

idle. I love it. Just,

it

dances quite a bit. But see, we practice what we preach right now. We're draining the breaking oil, then we'll fill it up with some new and then we'll be able to see how much power our 455 spins out on the

dyno.

But first you guessed it another break.

Got,

we dreamed it,

Joe Mandela machined it

and we just finished it.

All right. She's oiled up, warmed up and hey, we even shined it up a little bit. So we know it's ready to go. Now for the first pull, we're gonna take it from 25 to 4500 just to make sure everything's all right. By the end of this dyno session, we plan on making one horsepower per cubic inch if you remember. Right. That's 455. So it looks like we're ready to go. You ready? Whisker Biscuit?

Yeah. Let's see what it'll do. All right,

the first run was awesome without the off the horsepower is just not there 335

to set the initial timing, you need to remove the vacuum line and plug the port on the car.

That's good.

Something ain't right.

Uh

Here it is the culprit. We got a vacuum line with a small hole in it

and it's right at the opening of the canister. So it's not pulling full vacuum on the distributor for the advance. So we'll cut this thing shorter, fix it and hopefully make more power

so much for hope. Let's try to advance the timing a bit

right there.

Not the same.

It's making 500 ft pounds of torque, but the power is not there. About 330.

Hey, when you're sick, you call the doc and here's Mandela's diagnosis. I will swap it out while the summit 750 is good. It's just not big enough for this motor.

Soan went a holly 870 Street Avenger. And we were ready for another pole.

376 torque came down

but running lean. So time for bigger jets,

there was already an improvement.

Let's look at the graph.

It's,

yeah, man. That's wild chaos like this points to the distributor.

They use a bushing

and they were just so tight against the actual weight that it'll stick and shut. And as it went up through the RPM range, it wasn't advancing properly.

Yeah. 525 525 ft pounds. 437 horsepower. This thing's making some big torque numbers that'll work. It's an Oldsmobile though. Don't let the smile fool you, Mike won't be happy till he hits that magic 455 horsepower number. We're so close

real slow. Hey. All right,

perfect. But after countless runs time would run out.

It's frustrating when we get so close since I couldn't sleep. I bribed one of the camera guys to meet me for one last run.

Yes. Yes. Yes. 456 horsepower. That's that one horsepower per cubic inch. We even got 537 ft pounds of torque. Now, I think the reason this is all happening is because of the dry, cool air,

man. This is cool. Now, I'm happy

build on a budget horsepower projects that save you time and money.

Most of our budget tips deal with saving time and money while you're trying to make your motor run better. Well, this time it's all about making your car look better

if this thing works. We're gonna call it the colorful cure for the inferior interior.

All you need is about 20 bucks worth of materials including DPA, color of vinyl and fabric paint, some of their prep wipes

and of course, the masking tape,

of course, any time you paint, you do it in a well ventilated area.

Now, the tuner guys on tight budgets have been doing this for a long time

decorating everything from the dash to the door panels for a newer, more lively look.

Now, I gotta admit we're learning together on this one, but it can't be too difficult as long as we follow some basic steps.

We like cleaning first, which we've done in the case of this fabric here

and paint with patience. Here we go.

You wanna lay it down with nice even thin coats, side to side and beyond the edges, we'll probably lay down about three.

Now, it's not gonna change the color much, but it will make that unevenly faded fabric look younger than his years.

Well, not bad for a rookie.

This stuff dries amazingly. Quickly. In fact, I think it's ready for some masking tape and some real color here on the vinyl parts.

Now that we got a mask off, we can clean it thoroughly with one of these prep wipes

and dry it with a lint free cloth.

Same drill with the vinyl paint, three thin coats and don't forget to shake the can to keep the paint even.

Ok, here we go. Drum roll, please.

Hey, I gotta admit that looks pretty good.

And of course, we could go on with the door panels, headliner console, the whole interior

and it's not a professional job, but hey, 20 bucks for two seats,

that ain't too bad. 01 more thing,

there's nothing like a set of unrestricted mufflers when you go to a car show or the local cruise night.

But you know, sometimes you don't want that annoying drone when you're just driving down the highway.

But now you can have it both ways with Patriots Vera Flow tunable muffler

using sound flow inversion technology. You get this patented motor and valve design that lets you drive along

and redirect the exhaust, thereby changing the sound.

Now they come with 2.5 inch inlets and outlets, a very slim four inch body

and a simple two wire hook up for easy installation. It's ideal for street riders for the price of about 360. Well time for us to pipe down, pack it up and get out of here and get ready for next week's horsepower. We'll see you then.