355 Holden street engine

[KnightEngines]

Dyno'd this one last week, came out pretty good.
Combo is a little different to my usual street/strip 355's, the goal was a pump fuel street engine that can hold it's own on the strip on the odd occasion the owner wants to race, which won't be often so it's strongly biased towards street use.
Goal was 550hp under 7000rpm, drivability & long life were also priorities but a grumpy idle was acceptable.

Basis is a mid 90's 5.0L holden block, I fitted 4 bolt caps to the centre 3, ARP studs, did a short grout fill & modified the oiling system. It's 4.030" bore & zero decked.
Crank is 3.48" stroke COME cast with chev journals.
Rods are 6" Scat pro I beam
Pistons are CP bullet with 1/16, 1/16, 3/16 ring pack for long life
Powerbond steel balancer.
Oil pan is ASR, pump is a high volume cut down to semi high volume, pickup is stock

Heads are 'VN' iron with 2.055/1.6" ferrea 6000 valves, hand ported
Intake is Edelbrock vic jnr Holden with a match port & a little work on runner entries 1,2,7 & 8
Cam is a custom grind Crane street roller, 262/268 on 108 centres, .400/.378" lobes
Crane lifters, crane pushrods, crane gold stud mount rockers, PAC springs, crane retainers & locks.
Rollmaster red timing kit

Carb is an 850 quickfuel sitting on a super sucker 2" spacer
MSD pro billet distributor, locked timing, MSD 6AL box, Blaster coil & 8.5mm leads

Compression is 11:1 so it'll tolerate imperfect fuel

Headers are Pacemaker 1 3/4" primary tri Y with 2" secondaries & the original 2.25" collectors cut off far enough back to achieve a 2.5" choke & 3" collectors welded on.

We hit our goals with change & made more torque than I was expecting, motor was very well behaved on the dyno, pulls 10-12' vac at light throttle & is very responsive, behaves much nicer than cam duration would suggest!

It's going in a 3200lb VH commodore with 8" 5000 converter & 4.11 gears, will be a mid/low 10 sec car.

20190726_144035 by tony knight, on Flickr

20190726_102858 by tony knight, on Flickr

[cjperformance]

Nice work mate, thats a pokey little street beast.

[Carnut1]

Love your builds Tony. Thanks for sharing. Has great vacuum for those cubes and cam!

[Old School]

You mentioned you did a short grout fill. How much is that?

What I am getting at is that I have read, (no personal experience on my part) is that a filled block, and I don't know how much fill, will lead to higher oil temps than acceptable. Like I said, I have not tried it but have a bbc 511 with 2 quarts per side I would like to put in a street car. However, I don't want to do all the work only to find out I cannot cool the oil, even with an additional oil cooler.

Just wondering if you had experience on the oil temps? Thanks

[KnightEngines]

My short fill is pretty tall, about 2.1" down from the deck face.
An oil cooler is required, but oil temps are not a problem provided one is used.
On the dyno even without a cooler we never saw over 200 deg oil temps while running it in.

[hysteric]

Stop posting these engine builds Tony. You're depressing the rest of us mere mortals.

Just kidding mate keep them coming.

[lc-gtr-1969]

Great Work Tony!

I love seeing these build reports.. great stuff mate.

I cant wait to hear how your JZED holden 6 engine goes..

Kind regards

[KnightEngines]

That one is close to dyno now, I will definitely report back on results!

[RevTheory]

Those iron Holden heads seem to port up pretty well, yes?

[KnightEngines]

Yeah, they really work well with some grinder time, I've got about 22hrs in the heads on this & they're left off the carbide, I also port iron faster than most & have ported literally 100's of these things, so I dont have to stop & think.
I never even flowed them till they were ready for assembly & I could have skipped the bother, they were right where I though they should be!
It'd likely take most guys 50-100% more time to port them, the familiarity that comes with 1000's of hours grinding the same type of casting has it's advantages.

[vds]

Tony, at what power/torque figure do you think requires 4 bolt caps and filled water jacket on a Holden block ?

[KnightEngines]

Tony, at what power/torque figure do you think requires 4 bolt caps and filled water jacket on a Holden block ?

Depending on usage - street/strip stuff I think 355's need 4 bolt above 6500rpm or 550hp, 383's 6000rpm.
Grout fill I usually do for anything over 500hp, not really needed until over 550hp, but minimal downside & the bores stay much rounder so you can freshen a couple of times without a rebore.
383's I like to grout regardless of HP, they tend to push the bores around more.