Since we have a lot of "old-school/old guys" on here....

[6sally6]

That know SBC engines inside and out.......the old Duntov 30-30 camshaft.....what is the duration @050 and the LSA. Sure sounds sweet and powered a many hot rod . What about the numbers on Chevys other hi-po SBC engines?
Thanx
6sally6

[JoePorting]

http://forums.corvetteforum.com/c1-and- ... specs.html

http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/show ... p?t=399506

http://www.camaros.net/forums/archive/i ... 71994.html

[PackardV8]

The 30-30 Duntov Sure sounds sweet and powered a many hot rod .

The 30-30 Duntov was a great cam for 1957 and has a legacy which goes back to the very dawn of hot rodding. As such, it is a long duration, very slow ramp rate and moderate lift. That's all the oils and valve springs of the day would handle. The science of cam and spring design has come a long way in the past 50-60 years. Using a 30-30 Duntov today would be giving up a bunch of horsepower.

Here's more trivia than some may want to know, but we all build on the shoulders of those who raced back when. Since the "Duntov" cam has been mentioned a couple of times on this thread, according to Ed Iskenderian. the great Ed Winfield actually designed the cam which came to be known as the Duntov.

Winfield is the spiritual father of all California aftermarket cam grinders. He taught Iskenderian, Deema Elgin and most of the others who got their start trying to reproduce Winfield cams. Because the engine oils and valve springs of the day would not survive with high-intensity cam action, Winfield and the others were forced to design very long ramps and very soft action into their cams.

Ed Winfield was born north of Los Angeles in 1901. He and his younger brother, Bud, who later helped develop the famed Novi racing engine, began hot rodding early. At age eleven, Winfield had stripped down a Model T in search of higher speeds. A year later, he began grinding his own camshafts for motorcycle engines.

During high school, he concentrated on mathematics and physics, but his real education came when at fourteen, he started working in Harry Miller's shops in the carburetor department. There, as Gordon Eliot White wrote in his book, Offenhauser: The Legendary Racing Engine and the Men Who Built It, Winfield became fascinated with cylinder head, camshaft and carburetor design.

According to the recollections of Harvey Crane Jr., Winfield began experimenting with his own camshaft designs in 1919, when he built his first camshaft grinder. Soon after, his mother gave him the money to purchase a used grinding machine that he then converted into a camshaft grinder and set up in his mother's garage to regrind Model T camshafts.

"Ed told me he first made only two masters, a semi race grind and a full race grind," Crane wrote. "He later made a third master that was more duration and lift than the semi but less than the full. He then used the full race master as an intake and the new master as an exhaust. He called this new reground camshaft a three-quarter race cam. Ed said, 'It was three-quarters of the way to a full race cam.' "

Barney Navarro said that Winfield "pursued information to a greater degree than most engineers, even though he wasn't an engineer himself. He could calculate the curvature of the cam lobes to tell you at what rpm you'd experience valve float if you told him the weight and length of the valve and the valve spring tension."

Though successful in camshafts and the model of inspiration for another pair of Eds--Iskendarian and Donovan--Winfield found his largest degree of success in carburetor designs for the aftermarket. Thus, the Winfield Carburetor Company formed in 1924 to build, market and sell the carburetor designs, and Winfield carburetors soon dominated Indianapolis 500 racing. Pete DePaolo's Duesenberg won the race in 1925 using two of the carburetors, and by 1930, all but one entry in the race used a Winfield carburetor.

About this time, Winfield built another Model T with a revolutionary 180-degree crankshaft, which made the best use of the two siamesed intake ports of the Model T engine. Winfield called it the two-up, two-down engine, increased its compression ratio to 6:1, fitted it with a roller camshaft and proceeded to dominate the Southern California dirt track and dry lake racing scenes.

He retired from racing in 1927 and became a recluse. "He retreated to his home and worked on his designs for automotive camshafts, seldom going to the races, saying there was no point to his going either to the track or out to Muroc to watch the hot rodders run," White wrote. "Marvin Jenkins said many years later that Ed would tell anyone he didn't care for to 'go jump in the lake' no matter how much money they were offering for his help."

Ray Brown once related as a youth working for speed equipment manufacturer Eddie Meyer, he would have pick up camshafts from Winfield. "[Winfield's shop] had no number on the door, and if you knocked, he'd open the door maybe six inches, and your cams would come out, all wrapped in paper."

Winfield continued to experiment with fuel systems and engines, developing what's widely regarded as the first harmonic balancer, new carburetor designs, a continuous-flow fuel injection unit in 1934, along with overhead-valve heads and high-compression heads for Model T four-cylinders. He also continued to grind camshafts, mostly for race engines, until not long before he died in 1982.

some of the above quotes were excerpted from an article originally appeared in the FEBRUARY 1, 2008 issue of Hemmings Muscle Machines.

thnx, jack vines

[MODNROD]

That's a cool story Jack.
Please tell me he grew a long white beard, just to complete my imagined ideas of a reclusive genius!

[BrazilianZ28Camaro]

The 30-30 Duntov Sure sounds sweet and powered a many hot rod .

The 30-30 Duntov was a great cam for 1957 and has a legacy which goes back to the very dawn of hot rodding. As such, it is a long duration, very slow ramp rate and moderate lift. That's all the oils and valve springs of the day would handle. The science of cam and spring design has come a long way in the past 50-60 years. Using a 30-30 Duntov today would be giving up a bunch of horsepower.

Here's more trivia than some may want to know, but we all build on the shoulders of those who raced back when. Since the "Duntov" cam has been mentioned a couple of times on this thread, according to Ed Iskenderian. the great Ed Winfield actually designed the cam which came to be known as the Duntov.

Winfield is the spiritual father of all California aftermarket cam grinders. He taught Iskenderian, Deema Elgin and most of the others who got their start trying to reproduce Winfield cams. Because the engine oils and valve springs of the day would not survive with high-intensity cam action, Winfield and the others were forced to design very long ramps and very soft action into their cams.

Ed Winfield was born north of Los Angeles in 1901. He and his younger brother, Bud, who later helped develop the famed Novi racing engine, began hot rodding early. At age eleven, Winfield had stripped down a Model T in search of higher speeds. A year later, he began grinding his own camshafts for motorcycle engines.

During high school, he concentrated on mathematics and physics, but his real education came when at fourteen, he started working in Harry Miller's shops in the carburetor department. There, as Gordon Eliot White wrote in his book, Offenhauser: The Legendary Racing Engine and the Men Who Built It, Winfield became fascinated with cylinder head, camshaft and carburetor design.

According to the recollections of Harvey Crane Jr., Winfield began experimenting with his own camshaft designs in 1919, when he built his first camshaft grinder. Soon after, his mother gave him the money to purchase a used grinding machine that he then converted into a camshaft grinder and set up in his mother's garage to regrind Model T camshafts.

"Ed told me he first made only two masters, a semi race grind and a full race grind," Crane wrote. "He later made a third master that was more duration and lift than the semi but less than the full. He then used the full race master as an intake and the new master as an exhaust. He called this new reground camshaft a three-quarter race cam. Ed said, 'It was three-quarters of the way to a full race cam.' "

Barney Navarro said that Winfield "pursued information to a greater degree than most engineers, even though he wasn't an engineer himself. He could calculate the curvature of the cam lobes to tell you at what rpm you'd experience valve float if you told him the weight and length of the valve and the valve spring tension."

Though successful in camshafts and the model of inspiration for another pair of Eds--Iskendarian and Donovan--Winfield found his largest degree of success in carburetor designs for the aftermarket. Thus, the Winfield Carburetor Company formed in 1924 to build, market and sell the carburetor designs, and Winfield carburetors soon dominated Indianapolis 500 racing. Pete DePaolo's Duesenberg won the race in 1925 using two of the carburetors, and by 1930, all but one entry in the race used a Winfield carburetor.

About this time, Winfield built another Model T with a revolutionary 180-degree crankshaft, which made the best use of the two siamesed intake ports of the Model T engine. Winfield called it the two-up, two-down engine, increased its compression ratio to 6:1, fitted it with a roller camshaft and proceeded to dominate the Southern California dirt track and dry lake racing scenes.

He retired from racing in 1927 and became a recluse. "He retreated to his home and worked on his designs for automotive camshafts, seldom going to the races, saying there was no point to his going either to the track or out to Muroc to watch the hot rodders run," White wrote. "Marvin Jenkins said many years later that Ed would tell anyone he didn't care for to 'go jump in the lake' no matter how much money they were offering for his help."

Ray Brown once related as a youth working for speed equipment manufacturer Eddie Meyer, he would have pick up camshafts from Winfield. "[Winfield's shop] had no number on the door, and if you knocked, he'd open the door maybe six inches, and your cams would come out, all wrapped in paper."

Winfield continued to experiment with fuel systems and engines, developing what's widely regarded as the first harmonic balancer, new carburetor designs, a continuous-flow fuel injection unit in 1934, along with overhead-valve heads and high-compression heads for Model T four-cylinders. He also continued to grind camshafts, mostly for race engines, until not long before he died in 1982.

some of the above quotes were excerpted from an article originally appeared in the FEBRUARY 1, 2008 issue of Hemmings Muscle Machines.

thnx, jack vines

For the men that worked their minds thoroughly in the past to build our bases:

[bigjoe1]

When I first went to work at Edelbrock in 1968, they were doing testing on 327 engines. They got cams from many of the top cam companys, and it was apparent that in a race engine, the best factory cam was not very good. I remenber that the Racer Brown # 66R was as much as 70 HORSEPOWER BETTER than the factory grind in a full race engine. Even with a comparible grind, the Racer Brown ST-21 was 30 or 35 Horsepower better than the 30-30 grind. By 1968 standards, when we got our 327 to make 505 Hp with the then brand new tunnel ram manifold, it was pretty earth shattering.


JOE SHERMAN RACING ENGINES

[MarkR]

Thanks for the stories, I always love to here about how things got started, it's a bit like a family tree.

Mark

[PackardV8]

When I first went to work at Edelbrock in 1968, they were doing testing on 327 engines. They got cams from many of the top cam companys, and it was apparent that in a race engine, the best factory cam was not very good.

Like Joe, I was around in the glory days of the second generation muscle cars, the '62 413" Mopars, '63 427" Fords and 1966-1/2 when the 396" 425hp big block Chevy became available, to about 1972. The one fact which gets left out of all the magazine articles is GM especially, but also Ford and Mopar, didn't really want to sell their highest horsepower street engines. They almost always had to replace them under warranty! There were no electronic rev limiters and the valve spring technology simply wasn't there yet. My local Chevrolet dealer would not take orders for the 425hp 396" or the 350hp/375hp 327"s because the first few they sold all blew up and the service department couldn't get replacement engines from Chevrolet Parts.

To make the engines live long enough to get good stories in the hot rod press, the factories would have outside race shops build cheater cars to give to magazines for tests. The classic is according to the magazine articles of the day, the first '64 Pontiac GTO 389"s were just rocket ships. When young guys read that, got excited and put down their money, the cars they got were a full second slower at the strip. Years later, Jim Wangers wrote a tell-all memoir and admitted the test cars had fully blueprinted and upgraded 421"s in them. At one Car and Driver comparison test, the Mercury Comet GT arrived on the back of a Bud Moore race transporter.

Bottom line - as I said earlier, the long duration, low lift, soft action were all attempts to use a cam which would last through the warranty period. They didn't, but it was the best the factory engineers could do with the technology of the day. Racer Brown and the other aftermarket cam grinders sold their cams with higher rate springs and no warranty if or when it blew. Not surprising they made more horsepower.

jack vines

[panic]

The term "intensity" (referring to the difference between the nominal duration vs. the .050" duration) that Harvey Crane suggests in a useful idea, but IMHO backwards: a "low intensity" cam is hotter than a "high intensity" cam of the same nominal duration.

[CamKing]

That's a cool story Jack.
Please tell me he grew a long white beard, just to complete my imagined ideas of a reclusive genius!

No long white beard.
Ed Winfield and my dad remained good friends until his death.
My dad used winfield's cams in his winning Indycar engines all the way into the mid 70's.
When my dad decided to go into the cam designing business, Ed Winfield helped him along, and keep him pointed in the right direction.
Ed also made the first masterless cam grinder, that had multiple adjustable plates that could move to change Lift, Duration, dwell, acceleration, and Velocity.

Before he died, he told my dad he was righting a book about the errors he had found in Einstein's theory of relativity. I would live to see what he had written, just to get a small glimpse into how his mind worked.

[PackardV8]

Ed also made the first masterless cam grinder, that had multiple adjustable plates that could move to change Lift, Duration, dwell, acceleration, and Velocity.

IIRC, Ed Winfield made that from an old centerless grinder because he couldn't afford to buy a new production master type grinder. Ed Iskenderian stll has the original and it's sitting in his back shop.

FWIW, all these years after Ed Winfield's death, Ed Iskenderian is still in awe of the range of Winfield's breadth of interests and the areas in which he was the pioneer. When fans try to fawn over Isky for his many accomplishments, he'll sometimes say, "You should have known Ed Winfield. Now there was a man who understood how the physical universe worked. The rest of us just followed where he went first." Quite an epitaph.

jack vines

[TORQUE INC]

Thanks Jack,Mr Jones and others....plenty I knew alot i didnt,Dema said he was the smartest person he ever met

[eric's 327]

Here's a chart that may help. Even though it doesn't have the 30-30 cam specs, it has the L79, LT-1 and others.
The 30-30 cam was 254/254 @.050 with .485 lift, 114 LSA and 112 ICL. Duration was around 346 at 'lash point', and this cam had very long lash ramps. I think it was about 314 with lash at .030.

http://www.gmpartsdepot.com/SB_camshaft_chart.html

[levisnteeshirt]

had a friend with that cam in a 283 in a vega back in the day ,,, dern thing would just keep winding ,, wasn't real strong ,, switched to a engle 254 @ .50 108 LSA solid ,, it felt 100 % better with the engle cam

[Engguy]

Here's a chart that may help. Even though it doesn't have the 30-30 cam specs, it has the L79, LT-1 and others.
The 30-30 cam was 254/254 @.050 with .485 lift, 114 LSA and 112 ICL. Duration was around 346 at 'lash point', and this cam had very long lash ramps. I think it was about 314 with lash at .030.

http://www.gmpartsdepot.com/SB_camshaft_chart.html

The specs you gave were for I think, #3849346 that was the 365 / 375FI horse power, 327 cam, when I was younger I thought it was also the 30/30 because the lash was .030 for both in and ex. The part number was not listed on that chart.
Another good factory cam was #3965724 if the number I have is accurate.