Turning up the power

One thing led to another and I decided to get more power into the car. I have two 5.0 engines and each has it's pluses and it's minuses. The engine in the car has a roller cam but has a lot of mileage and is not suitable for big valve heads because the pistons do not have valve reliefs. The other engine came out of a truck and therefore does not have a roller cam but it was rebuilt recently and was supposed to have ported/polished heads and good pistons. I took the truck engine apart to see what I had and here are the pictures of what I found:

The bad news is that it has a flat tappet cam but the great news is that the block is machined for a roller cam. I ordered a Comp Cams XE282HR hydraulic roller cam to slide in it's place. It's an aggressive cam but this is a race car and there won't be much idling.

Those are pretty small valves and a large combustion chamber-in other words, low flow and compression ratio. I ordered a set of ProComp aluminum heads with big valves, stiff springs and a 60cc combustion chambers.

The pistons are .030 over hyperutectic with valve reliefs. These are a pretty good quality pieces and will handle big valves and decent horsepower

The intake ports didn't look to be ported and were smaller than the intake gaskets

The exhaust ports had one small bump ground away but as you can see, are a lot smaller than the exhaust gasket holes.