Rebuild Engine for 59 Lark VIII: Economical Performance?

[thunderations]

Turbos are a simple way to force air into the carb, just like Studebaker, (No fuel injection or computers) did with the Paxton SC. Superchargers take HP to make more HP. Turbos use waste, (exhaust) to make free HP. Yes, there are safety measures, (waste gate), needed to limit boost and tuning to get them correct, just like any other performance add on. Any shop that sells/installs turbos can get you vast amounts of information or set a system up for you. Engines don't want to be high compression or need lumpy cams to get performance. When driving normal the turbo usually gains MPG also. Fuel injection and computers are NOT required. AIR FLOW VARIANCE is what makes carbs work. More air is sucked/forced in drawing more fuel with it. What part of that changes? I don't see a problem building an air box around a carb, Studebaker did it in the 1960's. There was a post in the last several months about a turbo being installed on a Studebaker flat head six with little done to the old, tired engine itself. This was his experiment. Doing very little to an old engine to see how the turbo would perform. As I remember he kept adding boost to see how far it would go before it blew and did finally blow up the old engine by pushing it to far. Had he kept it reasonable, it may still be running today. He was in the process of installing the turbo on another flat head.

While a turbo is relatively inexpensive bolt on HP, There is more to setting it up than just bolting it on, particularly on a carbureted non-computerized engine. The carb's need to be able to deal with the pressure such as the pressure box used on the supercharged engines. Also, the jetting of the carb can be tough to get right because the airflow varies.

If you have more specific experience here, then please post specific information here, not just for me, but for those others that would be interested.

If bolting on a turbo were actually that easy, then we would have seen many more of them throughout the years.

It works much better for computer controlled fuel injected engines.

[sals54]

Wow sals54!

That was a TON of head work! How did you determine what was possible? I guess the sky's the limit if you have all the info available. I am concerned that if I go to that level that getting the valve seat pressures right, as well as all the travel ratios. That's not your average head work! Milling 0.125" off thee heads will REALLY increase the CR and make things interesting!

While it doesn't sound like a lot of people are boring out for more displacement, it sounds like the heads, valve trains, and cams are making the most difference.

I will be interested to hear more about this!

It really wasn't a TON of work to get this done. I did it myself, in my garage over a few weekends. (Well, the milling of the heads I sent out for, of course.) But the rest of it was just me, sitting at the workbench with my goggles and ear plugs, grinding away at the ports and the bowl area. I cut the push rods with a tubing cutter and hammered the tips back in as I could not afford custom push rods at the time. I ran that engine for several years, and still have the heads sitting on a shelf in the garage.
But it would rev like mad. I've had people tell me for years that my little engine could not or would not possibly rev over 5000 rpms due to all sorts of limitations of one sort or another, but I can tell you my Monster Tach was not lying. While it did not live at that RPM level for long periods of time, it was fun getting it there.
All I did was to grind the ports to match the gaskets, then smooth out the passages the best I could reach with the grinding burr I had. I remember reading that the intake should not be too smooth while the exhaust should be as smooth as one could make it. That was the only guide I used. The bowl area was hogged out for the 1.88 intake valve, then I simply ground out the bowl to be as clean as I could make it. And I also removed the hump of the valve guide that was sticking down into that area.
I put it together with thin steel head gaskets and enjoyed the drive for years after that. It perked up quite nicely, though I never bothered to have it dyno'd. I'm sure I would have been disappointed at the numbers, but nevertheless, the drivability was fantastic.