Personally, I think it is bad advice to give your average enthusiast advice to run stock internals.

If you do your own tuning, and KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING, or have decades of experience, have at it and enjoy proving people wrong (a la Stock48).

If this is your first build going after major power, at least run forged slugs and rods, IMO, where you can control the quality.

 

Or make sure to get a damn good, reputable tuner to get things safely squared away tune wise!

 

I’m a big proponent of using the proper parts for any given power level and the use of forged pistons and rods is always a wise investment. Opening up ring gaps should be investigated when certain conditions are met and could possibly have helped several members engines survive a little longer. Any engine is apt to break under any given set of circumstances, however if we are repeatedly breaking components in a LS engine that is still healthy with 8lbs of boost I would have to investigate something other than the hard parts as being the main culprit.

 

That's what I am doing. Breaking stuff is the easiest way to find something that doesn't work. That said, it isn't fun breaking stuff and it really makes you timid when it comes to tuning for big power. That's likely the main reason that I didn't go very fast last night at the track...big power takes a lot of careful fine tuning, and heat causes bad things to happen in the cylinder. A stock engine isn't going to hold up to abuse (detonation) like a forged engine will.

 

A properly set up forged engine will stand up to more abuse than a stock bottom end engine, but the same techniques that will destroy a factory bottom engine in 3hrs will still destroy a forged engine eventually. When you detonate a engine under boost you might as well be pouring BB's down the intake..

 

after seeing what it did to my truck I am amazed how much carnage detonation causes. Always heard and seen pics but never seen it in person

 

You have to do this either way.

 

Forged engines arent indestructible either, case in point:



This was with less boost, and less timing than I run now on my current setup, but there is more than that that goes into a good working engine. As everyone else said, find a good, no, GREAT tuner, that has done FI LS engines before.

 

holy **** man. how did the block look after that

 

The other 7 looked fine, but the block was trashed so I had to get a new block for my current 402.