Can you unfuck the v8's in these cars to make the power that they should? If so how difficult/expensive is it?

Can you unfuck the v8's in these cars to make the power that they should? If so how difficult/expensive is it?

Other urls found in this thread:

pontiacpower.org/enginecolor.htm
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

LS Swap

yes, relatively simple depending on which engine family you're looking at (chevy/pontiac V8)

Headers, exhaust, intake, and cam go a long way on malaise era shit. Doesn't cost a lot. Add on some heads and you'll be making some great power.

Fuck no.

This

I got Torquer heads, hedman headers, roller rocker valve train, cam, pistons, weiand intake manifold and a 142 Supercharger all mated to a TCI street fighter
Shit makes great power and torque now

Thank you, I love the style of 2nd gen T/As but what afraid of that 1970s power, and I'm not real big on engine swaps.

>saw a middle aged guy with a mullet and a pornostache driving one of these the other day
At least it looked like a good restoration job and not a shitbox

You also gotta look out for the rear end gear ratio. Some of those cars had shitty ass rear diffs that really Sapp the power out. I got a 3.42 8.5 inch 10 bolt open diff and I don't like it at all. With a 4.10 posi id be really scorching tires. I drove one once with a 2.something rear and it absolutely fell flat on its face off the line.

But yea to go from a smog era 350 to a fun one is basically just head job away. The block is about the same but those 70s heads sucked. Also u might need a new carb and intake too since some of these carbs won't ever run right if the stock smog equipment isn't hooked up

Do these run the low compression v8s? Best thing to do is bolt on a supercharger

iirc reading old car and driver mags some journalists right at the start of smog era pretty much just did intakes and exhausts on those to bring them back to what they used to put out and then crank up the compression with heads to make those things put out really respectable figures

oh ja

Yes you can

Heads, cam, supercharger, intake, exhaust. Older Chevys had massive problems with airflow. Older tires were shit too.

nice miata

Yeah
Not very

400 or 455?

W72 400

I think there is substantial evidence that user likes Pontiacs.

Really cheap, especially small blocks
All you need for 300-400HP:
>decent cam
>Dual or single plane intake, depending if you want torque or rippems
>decent high-cfm carb, get a double pumper if you can, but don't get anything too big for the engine
>good unrestrictive headers and exhaust, modern cat
and if you want to spend a bit more to get to the 400hp range, you can get decent heads

The stock 800 cfm Quadrajet is good.

Get a fan shroud and get rid of the nigger-tier universal braided rad hose

Kill yourself faggot

My dad had a pre smog Malibu he wooped everything in his path in the 80s because the thing had so much power compared to the cucked up engines in these other cars of the era

>hackjob

Nobody ITT has a clue what the fuck theyre talking about.
Its not just "headers and a cam", the heads low compression smog shit and the pistons probably are too.

and a cam swap isnt cheap or easy either unless you do it yourself, but even then your cam is gonna be limited by your compression.

TL;DR LS swap or a 1996-2000 chevy vortec

?

It's probably a lot easier to just stuff a new crate engine in there unless you got the time to pull all the smog shit off and rebuild it.

>nobody knows what to do
>JUST SPEND MORE MONEY THAN YOU WOULD ON THE ORIGINAL ENGINE

Proves my theory that all people who LS swap are just ignorant retards who don't like cars or learning about them.

even worse dude. you just assembled it and blasted it with blue piss.

here's how i did mine, 1 part at a time. notice a difference?

Not op or that other guy but that’s a really clean looking paint job. I have my 302 Windsor on a stand right now since I’m rebuilding and I was thinking about painting it black to match the exterior of the car then it was all done.

Wait so these cars were coming out gutted in the same year Australia was getting some of the best cars it had seen?

Not going to lie that's exactly what I did.
Paint is 78 specific though
pontiacpower.org/enginecolor.htm

>painting an engine black
>spend weeks looking for where an oil drop is coming from

>meticulously building an engine
>leaking oil

my 4 banger pic above is from 2010, ive been beating the absolute shit out of it since. no leaks, never have to empty the catch can, everything is fine.

Am joking user, I have yet to tear mine down, waiting to hit 300k, but it’s a bitch looking for leaks when she’s real dirty.

ah, i got ya.

yeah its really a clean/dirty thing in the end. if its clean you'll figure out whatever you need to quickly whether the paint is gloss black or gloss white.

or you can just unfuck the engine it has and spend less money while not being like everybody and their granny putting ls engines into everything they can

unironically this

not really, i just noticed your garbage engine. Have fun miata boi

What heads you got on that

Don't listen to all the meme answers.
You'll have to tear the whole engine down and replace a lot of things. And if you take apart the engine you have to redo the rod bearings and all of the gaskets. Relatively cheap parts, but quite a lot of work. Then pretty much everything but the block needs to be replaced.
New exhaust headers, new intake, new carb, new camshaft, new cylinder heads and roller valve train new pistons, HE ignition, new bearing caps if you want it to actually last, new exhaust. And it's not like there's a 1 sized fits all better solution for any of those things. Unless you want your car to turn into some shitty meme project that gets beaten at the track by stock civics it all has to be fine tuned to work together. If your exhaust is too wide it won't flow fast enough at high rpms. If your exhaust is too narrow it won't flow consistently enough at high rpms. Same for intake flow. It's not so bad if you can do all the wrench work yourself (if you can't it will cost you a small fortune in labour)

That's why
is a popular response.
anybody telling you that it's cheaper to just re-dress the engine is a bus riding pathological lying underage piece of crap. If you can find an LS1 Camaro/Vette that is wrecked except for the engine it's fairly cheap to just swap the engine in (but there's a 0 percent chance that an LS is designed to mate to the transmission and chassis of a 78 Firebird so it will require some fabrication work).
And that's why LS Swaps are popular. That said if you are a wrencher there's lots of tools out there to help you custom order heads and cams and shit in order to get the power you are looking for.

The retarded way to do it is to just start frankensteining the engine a little at a time. You should set a horsepower goal and then research what you need to get it done.

>the heads low compression smog shit and the pistons probably are too
So put some better fucking heads on it? Much cheaper and far less work than dropping in an entirely different engine and getting that to work.

>pretty much everything but the block needs to be replaced
is this really true

That's how you actually tune an engine outside of the bus rider delusion that permeates online "car culture".

Not if it's got the 301 with the godawful siamesed ports

Because yours and a stripped Pontiac 400 are even close to the same thing? His engine looks fine.

The reason muscle cars were making 300-400+++ horsepower in the late 60s was little reason other than the fact that lead fuel additives (i.e. cheap high octane fuel) and no smog regulations to speak of allowed manufacturers to set the engines at like 13.5:1 compression ratios, run richer fuel mixtures and just have big gaping valves with aggressive lift to push the torque bands nice and high.
All things that are great for cheap and easy power, but also really bad for smog production. So when smog regulations hit and leaded fuel additives were banned the solution was obvious. dial down compression ratios to like 8:1 and less aggressive valve timing. It was a cheap and easy solution that just meant changing the pistons and the heads. That's also when it was decided that all gasoline engines would run 14.7:1 stoichiometric ratios. They produce the least amount of pollution at that ratio.
So a 78 is going to need new pistons, new heads and a cam job at bare minimum and that still might only push you into the 200s.

Don't forget they were so rating them in gross horsepower, which is the engine on a stand with no accessories. They switched to net horsepower soon after, which is at the crank as you'd find it in the car, which is a good chunk lower of a number. It looks like they're making more than they really are because of that.

>is this really true
If you're wanting monster numbers like everybody posts up now, then yes.

However with these 70's smoggers you can make extremely satisfying improvements in power with a decent exhaust system, which includes ditching that ridiculously restrictive pellet-type cat, recurving the ignition which is kept intentionally slow to promote heat in the exhaust, and retuning the carb which is intentionally lean. Just that is usually enough to put a smile on most people's faces and a cam swap would be a bit of icing on the cake so to speak.

Which is why I said it's better to come up with a performance goal first and then work out what you need. He needs to figure out which engine he has, what the specs on the heads and cam are etc. If he just wants something that sounds louder and will give him a little more oomph when he jumps on it (but isn't out to impress anybody but himself at the track) then yeah.. I suppose exhaust is a good start. Those old catalytic converters were pretty restrictive compared to modern stuff.
If he wants serious numbers like 300+ range though he will have to do a lot of homework.

Also for tuning if you want to get really serious a program like Desktop Dyno always helps. Although if you want to have a little more fun Bethesda Softworks used to make drag racing computer games that were based around desktop dyno, I shit you not.

>but isn't out to impress anybody but himself at the track
I always found that was the funnest part of the chase. Making cheap changes that make big ET reductions. Once it starts costing real money then it becomes a drag.

Oh and when you start dropping ET's by noticeable numbers each pass people DO notice. By the end of the night you've got an audience in the pits and in the stands. One time it got so obvious that we started doing stupid shit like pulling off wipers and the antenna and laughing when we started noticing copycats.

Why didn't American automakers just cut their engines in half while keeping the same HP/L ratio they were working on? Would a 150HP V8 be more fuel efficient than a 150FP I4?

>Bethesda Softworks used to make drag racing computer games that were based around desktop dyno

Man, that Todd Howard guy sure is a genius. I wonder what he's up to these days.

>while not being like everybody and their granny putting ls engines into everything they can
>engine special snowflakes put "originality" on top of criteria for an engine upgrade

The first go-around of emission regs were somewhat flawed, (no doubt at GM's insistence) in that they favored larger engines that were less stressed. That got fixed in 75 or 6 but by that time the path was set. Also there was marketers concerns that Americans wanted a certain feel of power, which was/is true, and finally the US was clearly going into recession by the early 70's so nobody wanted to spend money they didn't have to. Especially so soon after breaking the bank with engines in the 60's.

Well Americans also loved towing campers and shit with their cars. So they still needed lots of low end torque

That miat in the background is rad as fuck, nice wheels.

If you don't know how to make any power on sbc for cheap you're retarded

the advantage of low compression is that it is friendlier to turbos, you can get real cheap ones on ebay

Stock 6x-4 heads.

The EPA.

Why or how did Australia manage to avoid it?

By being in Australia

They, and the rest of the world, weren't on an emissions control kick for their home markets until about a decade later. Except for a couple of bright points like the CVCC engines most attempts by imports to conform to US emissions control requirements were pretty abysmal too. By the time everybody else got on board with needing significant emissions controls there was a good idea of what worked well and what didn't so they didn't get hammered as badly.

That's what making horsepower takes, it isn't just plugging in a laptop.

You're not a car enthusiast, you wouldn't understand.

fuck off

Why don't you fuck off, benchracer.

you're the benchracer here faggot. If you had a car you'd know about choosing cost and ease of work over originality and upvotes on social media.

>I'm the benchracer
>Not the no talent guy who only cares about numbers and how easy something is

Lol, seriously fuck off. You aren't an enthusiast. You don't even care enough about cars to put any effort in.

>no talent guy who only cares about numbers and how easy something is
You don't have a car faggot. You've never done an engine swap. You don't know how costly changing everything minus the block is expensive compared to salvaging an early LS.

Original engines are better off in a classic than a shitty LS. You disgusting LS swapping fags ruin classic cars.

Keep projecting faggo, just buy some 4th gen F-Body instead of fucking a cooler car.

Hey faggots, swapping the engine isn't that big of a deal. You can always rechange it, except if you're a "number matching" faggot. I'd agree if it was something that could ruin the frame.

I'm not about numbers matching, I just hate seeing a LS in a classic car. In a shitbox no one cares about & they made heaps of them, sure.

>People think that an LS swap ruins a car
It fits in any place a 350 would
Getting a cam, intake, headers and heads for a 350 might actually cost more than an LS

There's way more "classics" out there than you think. Most of them aren't high-end and optioned out. There's nothing to "ruin".

Call me a snowflake all you want but fuck LS swaps, they are completely devoid of any personality. This is the last generation of Pontiac that even came with a Pontiac V8. I'd spend more to make less if it kept a Poncho under the hood.

I bet you think a 350 in a hotrod is acceptable too. I appreciate the time spent in converting a 32 ford to run a ford v8 instead of a chebby.

but in 1988 Australia was still making stupid cars

Ford only made two good V8's ever though
The 429 and the 351

Only year you could even get a Chevy 350 in a Trans Am was '79. A 350 with those mods is still going to be stouter than any LS you get for the money.

By the late 80's so was America. Everyone goes on about the GNX but this was an even quicker V6 turbo.

you missed the 428scj. but the 351 is a solid engine, better than a 350.

Swap in an LS1. Definitely better than any carb'd shit you could put in there.

Then why are the fastest carbed SBC and BBC cars faster than LS cars?