I have a 72 Skylark with a 455 Buick out of a 70 Wildcat (stock motor) (so im told by the guy I bought it from have not pulled it to get any #s yet) I am wanting around 550-600 horsepower out of it but am playing hell finding parts for it want to be able to drive it on the street not real big on the strip scene. If you were building it for 550-600hp and had around $6000-7000 for the motor what would you do and where would you get the parts. Please help as Im pretty new to all this understad the basics and am using the skylark to learn as I go.
1)550-600hp 2)$6k-$7K 3)Street Motor - You can do 1&3, or 2&3 but not 1&2 and certainly not all three unless your getting your machine work done for free or nearly free. Your looking at a $2500 set of heads to get in that territory and your scratching block girdle territory. If you lower you hp numbers to 450-500hp and your frugile you can probably build a nice realible street engine in you budget.
big power Hi Scar Please sign your posts - we're a friendly bunch here and like to know what to call you! It's pretty tough to make the kind of horsepower for the bucks you're talking about with a 455. It's harder to keep the motor together after you do. Buicks are great for mountains of torque. Huge horsepower requires winding a motor to high rpm which is not good with the stock Buick bottom end and block. You can build a Buick that will kick a** on the trash talking "got nascar heads on it" "700 horsepower" Chebbie guys just by using common sense and the natural strengths of the Buick Torque Monster. There have been a couple of posts asking similar questions lately. Scan the old threads, you can check these out for a start. http://www.v8buick.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=19716 http://www.v8buick.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=18817
The nice thing is: you don't need 600 hp to get high to mid 12s at around 110 mph. Guys around here with ~400 hp and a 4000 lb car are doing that with 455s right now. And you can drive 'em on the street:TU: It would be nice to see a dyno pull at 700 hp in your street car but that's a lot of motor for the street. 500 hp is sort of a nice, "magic" number that guys like to talk about but the truth is you don't need that to run strong and hard in a Buick 455, and frankly, you'll have a little bit of work to do to hit that 500 hp number. Can be done, but like it's been mentioned, not for cheap money. The Buick 455 is a little more expensive to build than a Chevy engine of comparable size and you need to watch were your money goes. No good building an engine that will pull 600 hp once and then grenade on you. A block girdle has been mentioned. You may or may not know that one of the advantages of the Buick 455 is light weight. It's approxomately the same weight as a Chevy 350 with iron heads and manifolds. One reason that the Buick 455 is comparitively light is that the main webs of the block are thin, only 3/8". This was never a problem, since the stock hp numbers were around 400, racers of the day weren't going to add 50% on to that number very often, and the rpm limit was 5500. Today, we can go into higher rpms, and we have some really impressive performance parts to choose from that can top the engine out over 600 hp. But that comes at a price- frangibility (I love that word!) A block girdle would be a wise choice for a 600 hp engine, and it's not a bolt on part- the block needs to be machined to accept it. A lifter girdle would be wise too, since you'd probably be running a pretty aggresive solid cam. But like I say, the really good news is that with the Buick 455, you can get horsepower AND torque in such numbers and in such a broad power band that you don't need a peaky 600 hp engine to run impressively quick on the street. Or on the strip, for many weekend racers. The rpm number at which the Buick 455 makes gobs of torque has been decribed as "subterranean":Brow: You shouldn't have much trouble building a 455 you'll like
