http://www.carcraft.com/projectbuild...ock/index.html

Claimes that the stock motor with a carbed set up made 430hp. Installed a cam and made 488hp. I wonder if the carbed intake is that much better than the stock intake. I wish theywould have done the test on the motor with the stock intake!

 

they are doing a flywheel dyno so you need to factor in drivtrain loss so that 58 hp is more like 30 or so

 

Yeah I understand that but arent these motors rated at 325 for the LQ4 and 345 for the LQ9.

 

later on yes.
the motor used in the article is before 2000, it came with iron heads.
if they had used a set of aluminum heads they would have gained about 4 to 8 extra horses.
the iron heads and the aluminum heads were very close on the 6.0.
we have already learned from on here and on tech the gm hot cam is a poor chouse for a cam upgrade.
if they had used a set of LS6 heads to bump compression up and a better cam, they could have gone over 500 hp at the crank with that set up.

 

I wouldn't say the Hot Cam is a poor choice overall. They should have gotten a much larger cam for that intake/carb setup.

 

their are much better cams out their.
what surprises me is that they used an old iron head 6.0, with unknown mileage, not sure of how long it was sitting, did a cam swap and ran it up to 488 hp @ the crank.

 

Yeah I agree with the much better cams out there, but from my own experience with it the drivability was nice for the power I gained. Also, the tuning was easy although the big split caused some idle issues.

I thought that was a little weird too that they just took a motor, swapped a cam, threw a carb and intake on it and ran. Not that it isn't cool, but its kinda odd. I think the reason they chose the iron head is to show the old schooler's how much better the EFI carb setups are compared to their Gen I stuff. Typically (before I knew anything about Gen III's) aluminum heads automatically scare people away because they think they need more money for the motor.

 

The mild cams seem to be making great HP/TQ under the curve. The guys running strokers and huge cams don't seem to be making that much more than a mild cam 6.0 with these heads for the most part, and are a lot harder to tune. I'm actually thinking about the hot cam or ASA cam vs the custom grind I have in the garage just for that issue alone. The ASA would be harder to tune, but with the low lift numbers it would be a LOT easier on valve springs and related valvetrain. Hummmmmmmmm...

 

That's the reason I went with the hot cam is the lower lift helps keep air velocity going into the cylinder. The huge lift cams help when you're pumping air into the cylinder or spraying nitrous, but in my n/a application the lower lift benefits from the smaller cubes. With LS6 heads I would run a different cam, but for the time being it was a nice setup that got good reliable power.

I drive my truck every day and don't want to worry about any potential problems from aftermarket springs. I'm not saying the springs out there are bad, but I'll stick with my GM engineered spring designed for my cam.

 

When Car craft dyno a motor the numbers seem to be a lil inflated sometimes.....