The higher compression will help with the part throddle power at lower rpm (od) were it's going to be hard to get any aftermarket cam to help much. I use to pull with my 5.3 when it had a cam, pretty lazy in od but when it down shifted to third it pulled like a freight train.

 

See that's just it, most of my cruising and towing is going to be 65mph or under. It does
pretty good in the cruising dept. But from a dig it sucks and the convertor I got was for
heavy towing in a 4L65e and the builder said he wouldn't warranty it if I wanted anything over 2000 stall. I am looking for durability but also figure I shouldbe able tweek things a little over the stock cam without totally killing what fuel mileage I have.
I kind of think that I have too much compression right know anyway. The bottom end is lq4 dished pistons and the heads are 97(?) Ls1 heads. I think they are the 66cc heads w/ 2.00 intakes. Everything I read said the 317s I pulled off flowed better but I thought that the upped CR w/ the smaller combustion chamber and the 1.8 rockers would make it run strong. I was wrong. I have watched several logs very carefully for knock retard with this set up and none is present so the only thing left to do is put better heads on it and while I am in there swap to a better cam.
Another thing Richard mentioned was that the 862 heads I talked about in my first post, is the CR would be like 11 or 11.5:1 and I would have a hell of a time keeping the torque down low due to low rpm cams not bleeding off enough pressure and knock would kill timing and I would be fighting a viscious circle of headaches. He also mentioned the only way he would run that much CR would be to go e85. I am not that big of an ethanol fan to do it on a daily driver.

 

So I got my heads back from the machine shop and while they were there I had them cc'd and the combustion chambers are right at 63cc, intake runners are 212 cc? I think thats good. It would probably be better on a larger displacement engine but definately better than whats on my engine now. The machine shop manager also does port work at home and has a flow bench so I thought he may know a few things about how they look.
He said that they had the critical points that he trys to incorperate in his port work and that the cnc program used did not look like a hack job, So I am optimistic.
Now based on the new knowledge of what the macinist relayed to me, would these heads be too much for a small cam and low speed torque that I am looking to achieve?