I tried another little experiment with a Chevy Caprice wagon I had one time. I think the thing weighed about 4300lbs. It had a wore out 305 in it so I decided to see how much mileage I could get out of it. Built a 350 using 305 heads on it. Normally this would give you a LOT more compression than is good except,,, I took a set of TRW flat top pistons (the ones that are ½? thick on the top,,NO KIDDING!) and dished them out to give me 8.5 compression with the pistons at zero deck. The 305 heads I used were the early two barrel with super small 1.700 intakes! I wanted the most velocity possible as I was going to have the trans shift @ 4300rpm. It had an R700 overdrive with lockup converter and a 2:73 rear. I ran 235x15x75 tires for even less RPM. I used an Isky Mile-A-More cam which had an RPM range from IDLE (no kidding) to 4000 or so. This thing had one of those electronic feedback Quadrajets on it with an aluminum intake. I used stock exh manifolds with a 2 ½? single exhaust and low restriction (quiet) muffler. That combo was pretty close to what I was looking for. It would actually spin the tires from a dead stop if you just nailed it! Had GREAT throttle response and torque. The torque curve was just a TAD short as you could FEEL it start to come off the curve just before it would shift. Probably 5 or 10? more duration would have been perfect. It would get about 23MPG @ 65mph and 18mpg @,,,,,, 80mph!!!! With that thing locked up in overdrive it was just loafing @ 80 and was solid as a rock at that speed!!! We LOVED that car for trips and put 120k on it (total on body was 250k.). Just shows to go ya you CAN get pretty decent mileage out of V-8s if they?re done right! But HEY,,, that?s just me!! Bruce Hevner -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://splatter.wps.com/pipermail/amc-list/attachments/20081016/6b5fbf89/attachment.htm _______________________________________________ Amc-list mailing list Amc-list@xxxxxxxxxxxx http://splatter.wps.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/amc-list