My buddy Ed St Angelo must have had something figured out. He ran the 400/430 Stage 1 and 2 up to 7500 rpm with 4.78 gears and 4 speed in AHRA stock and super stock in 1969/1970. He said he never hurt an engine.....
He is and did.....he got me started in the whole Buick thing...... Back then it was West coast vs East coast to some degree with the start of Buick performance. And then there was Gary Paine and the gang in Ohio.... I didn't get involved until 1976 when I bought my 67 Riv GS. I missed out on the early 70s squirreling around modifying my Opel Manta. First thing swap in 10.5 pistons for the 7.5 ones.....3 points of compression woke it up along with cam and ported heads......when I was your age, John....
All I know is he built the engines carefully and always wanted a perfectly straight crank. I had to give him three to choose from. Most had some degree of runout. Back then you didn't show all your cards so maybe he had a trick or two up his sleeve..... I'll have to pick his brain sometime.....
1967 we were blowing up 400 quicker than we could build them direct quote from Jim Bill out of a Kenne Bell newsletter an a GSCA newsletter.
I believe it but doesn't mean they weren't doing something wrong....everyone was on a learning curve when that motor came out.... Could have been toooo much timing....no one really knew right away that 30-32 was it with iron heads.... I knew a guy that insisted that it ran best a quart low on oil and at 38deg.timing...guess what...blew it up..... As far as oiling the early 1/2 pickup was not good....later 5/8 helped a lot.
How long did you get out of your engine with this oil pump set up that I have before bearing wear accured?
The original stage one engine was rebuilt by the original owner at 26,000 miles when I bought the car in 1983 it had 58,000 miles I don't know if he added the big oil pump at time of rebuilt I raced it a few times at atco raceway and one night I went street racing in South Philly had a few street races on the way home I start hearing a noise lo and behold it was a rod knock still had 60 pounds Oil pressure when I tore the motor down and took the cam out the front bearing was basically gone. If you plan on driving this car on the street I would definitely change the timing cover, even a oil pump with a quarter inch bigger gear puts a lot of stress on cam gear and distributor.
I'm going to change the cam out to a c 107 and put a stock timing cover on and use everything else as is and how it runs also going to put the .20 gasket on and hope the pump gas if fine
I would get a new oil pump kit with new gears and a booster plate TA sells different thickness oil Pump gaskets in a kit so you can get the clearance right.
KB did strange things back in the day trying to solve oiling problems. I have a KB oil pump that has four gears, two stacked on top of each other side by side. Can you imagine the pressure that would pump? I can't put pictures on here but if anybody has an early KB parts book, post the picture of it. Thanks.
I talked to the man that I got my KB race parts from and he said that when he raced back in the 70's they had so much oil pressure with that pump that you could see the oil filter pulsing!
Great find, but I have to marvel why someone would do something like that. Spend all that money on an engine + and then stuff it in storage indefinitely. I know there was a shipping accident, but you fix it and move on. Even by today's standards, $3900 is not nothing.
Yeah I had 110 psi but that was with old school 20/50 oil. KB said put the regular relief spring in. Of course that made no difference since it didn't matter if it was relieving at 40 or 60 it was going to go way past it. I put 10/30 in and still had 95. Ate up bronze dist gears as snacks. Went back to stock pump and never looked back. It's only good if you have .003-.0035 clearances which is how some racers ran their setups back then.
It's how some are built today to get the oil to flow across to bearing to help cool things. We have to remember oil pressure doesn't save engines.......oil flow does, pressure is just the measure of flow resistance. You can have 100psi and burn bearing up, and have 10and they live......
