has any one on this board done a blowen flathead? if so what can you tell me about doing one and where to get the parts new or used. & yes i did a search but no blowen flathead stuff just a lot of good teck stuff. oh ya pixs would be nice too.
One of my guys in Nor Cal has a whipple blown flathead dry lakes '31 A bone.. I can get some info from him if you need.
You thinking of that Blower Crow has? Their are several Flathead Blower books out there. Mine are already loaned out I had a plan made to put that little blower on a flatty. Takes a little basic machine work to adapt a manifold for that one as none are made.
Gr*** hopper, did you get the CARE pkg I sent you yet? Was fun drinking the bar in Joplin dry w/ you. DAVE
cool any thing would help. i am waiting on a book from Joe (Aben?) called blowen flatheads but i just can't wait I NEED INFO ASAP MY BLOOD IS PUMPING I NEED OLD SCHOOL POWER. in info would help me. thanks GH
You thinkin' 4-71 , 6-71, or something like a whipple?? Youll get more ponies out of the whipple, but that isnt considered old school... We also had a belly tanker, powered by a '53 Flatty and a nitrous fogger system, custom heads...but managed to hit 207mph with her last year at bonne. I already asked him for some pics and info for ya.
DAVE yes i got it yesterday thank you i tried calling you around noon my time but no one answered so i was going to page you today on this board and tell you thanks. I had a good time talking with you about the old days. it looks like we are going to build two model A one with a flatly and one with a Chevy 327 so the mounts will help in doing the 327. I still would like to talk to you off line about the thing down the street from your place. I will try and call you later today. thank you for the parts and your time.
road devil Which one would be the easiest to make work or is one cheaper then the other to do? Thanks for the info this is what i am looking for because i have no clue on what to look for and i don't want to get screwed on some thing.
Easiest and least spendy I would say is probably a 4-71...small, mild blower. I just sold off a 6-71 detroit style blower...let it go cheap too $100.
if you heir of any more around that $ let me know.i will do a search for a 4-71 on the net and e-bay. thanks
If your wanting an "old timey" blower, then search for a SCoT. If you get ALL the parts with it, (manifold, pullies, etc.) it bolts right on. $$$$? Well, they CAN get pricey! But they are easy to rebuild.
The Retro Street Rod Blown Flathead Ford V-8 Blown Flatheads Battle Rocker Arms For Rodding Supremacy and the Allure of the Flathead Renaissance An Uncommon Engineering Featured Article part I A Trip Back In Time During my 20 seasons of Indycar Racing, I had the opportunity to meet some of the genuine originals from Hot Rodding's Golden Age. The story as it was told to me is fascinating. It's really about the celebration of Americans' drive to free themselves of boundaries, and wholeheartedly embrace the freedom and prosperity unrestricted wheeled travel brought to the American culture. Today, that unrestricted travel dream is far less evident when we're trapped in commuter gridlock, simply trying to minimize the wasted time between work and home, and surrounded by rude and impatient people in their lookalike cloned jelly bean cars. No wonder the intense longing for a happier and more meaningful time evoked by the timeless silhouette of a 32 Coupe. Today's aftermarket juggernaut really owes its existence to the original band of dry lakes Hot Rodders, and their modified Flathead Ford V-8s. From humble origins in the depths of the depression came Henry Fords ultimate automotive marketing weapon, the m*** produced V-8 engine, introduced to the public in 1932. Why he felt the public needed a V-8 isn't as important as the decision he made to produce it. Because when Henry produced, he produced millions of copies. And he made the V-8 affordable to those who would develop their limitless skill and imagination and transform it into the Hot Rod experience. I wasnt on the scene for the beginning of Hot Rodding, my formative years were forged in the era of AJ Foyt and Fireball Roberts beaming that "made in USA" smile as they ran faster and harder than anybody else. Fireball became a legend behind the wheel of Smokey Yunicks honking 421 Pontiac Catalinas in NASCAR, while AJ ran em over in his Bignotti prepared OFFY Roadsters in the USAC circuit. But all I could do was read the car magazines, watch "Speedway International" on B&W TV, and dream, because big-time racing was still 15 years ahead in my future. The one thing I knew was that I was gripped by the incredible sound that nightly roared past my open window after bedtime, it was a sound unlike any I had ever experienced. I asked and asked what that sound belonged to, but it wasnt sufficiently important to anyone else to tell me at the time. It was both beautiful and belligerent, and it stirred me. Years later I found out it was the voice of the Mighty Flathead V-8. As my pro racing career wound down after 20 years, I decided that I would like to recreate that sound for myself. I found myself increasingly fascinated with flatheads, notably the Hudson Hornet 7X and the Ford V-8. These engines had missed out on the CNC age of aftermarket parts, and were missing from the glossy catalogs piled high on my desk from all the current suppliers. There became an opportunity to build engines that needed modern engineering techniques, but had a cl***ic Hot Rod appeal. Engines that needed laborious machine work, reams of design work, real Hot Rod skills like welding and grinding stroker cranks and boxing connecting rods. Fabricated blower manifolds, retro-look blower drives, fabricated headers, hand porting and relieving, back counterboring spring seats, billet cams turned on the lathe. Finally, a project that required something other than a catalog and a credit card to create. I was getting in deeper. I started out first by building the Fabulous 6-71 Blown Hudson 8X, a Retro Fueler 328 cube one-of-a-kind inline Flathead 6. That this engine was so well received by people at the shows I decided to go one step further and build a Retro Blown Ford V-8. I have seen a lot of Hot Rods, and those few that werent Chevies were sporting normally aspirated Flatty Fords, the same engines that started it all way back when. But the Ford V-8 was severely limited in displacement potential, it was difficult to break 300 cubes even with a Full House 3/8 X 3/8 Ford bored and stroked V-8. ( Ford 239 with 3 3/8 bore and 255 Merc crank stroked an 1/8, or stock Ford stroke plus 3/8). This might have been Full House in the 40s at the dry lakes, but it wasnt going to give a ride nearly as nimble as the typical SBC powered Rod. Besides, that same path has been gone down thousands of times in the past. I looked around at available Supercharger setups for the Flathead V-8, but the only thing I saw were modern "street" Blowers with serpentine belt drives mounted atop Flathead Fords. While I have to give credit for this feat of engineering, it somehow lacks the no-nonsense appeal of the cl***ic Gilmer belt driven GMC blower. I began seriously researching the earlier supercharged engines to see who had built what back in the Golden Age of Rodding. As I paged through pictures of early Blown Flatheads (and there werent an awful lot of them in those days) I saw mostly multiple Vee belt driven 3-71 GMC, Italian Italemecchanica, or USA cloned S.C.O.T. blowers being sported by the Heavy Hitters of that era. I wasnt enamored with multiple Vee belt drives from a practicality standpoint, as they routinely stretch and slip, and need constant attention and replacement, in matched sets. Then I ran across a few photos of the Yates-Newmire Flathead circa 1955, with a Gilmer belt drive. This was an amazing discovery for me, as here was the earliest use of a Gilmer belt on a blower that I ever had seen, as my collection of HRM goes back to only 1955 or so. And Leroy Neumeyer was remarkably still around, working the Indy 500 Hulman family ranch in Wyoming. So he might be persuaded to provide some speed secrets and moral support for the project. That engine had set some long standing records in the Neumeyer / Art Chrisman #25, a former circle track car generously lengthened into a potent Slingshot (a term coined by Leroy !) TF dragster. Art Chrisman, Jack (legendary FoMoCo A/FX & Funny Car chauffeur) Chrisman's uncle, bought the car from Leroy when he went into the service, and set some phenomenal times with it, it is credited not only with being the first Slingshot Dragster in the 9's, but also broke the 140 MPH barrier. Incredibly, it was originally built as a Sprint Car by Doug Caruthers, according to his son Roy, and is occasionally on display at the NHRA Museum. Becoming increasingly enamored with the idea of building a real period Blown Flathead, practicality dictated a 49-53 8BA block so I could put a modern Ford C4 auto ****** on it for Street Rod use. Any resemblance to the Mighty Yates-Newmire 1955 "World's Most Powerful Flathead V-8" would be clearly intentional. This engine was to combine the revolutionary features of the 1955 engine, with as many NOS period items, as I could find, but be detailed to an extreme to make a one-of-a-kind show worthy engine. As is typical, I jumped into this project with both feet, buying up some long hibernating 8BA blocks to experiment with, and deciding on which blower would look right but be practical for a street engine. I looked through all the Blower Drive catalogs, but came to the conclusion that if I wanted something unique I was going to have to build it myself, just like it was done in the old days. An "off the shelf" CNC blower drive was not going to give the accurate look or aura of a 1955 built engine, and that's what you see first. Like bell-bottoms on a Brooks Brothers suit, it just wasnt going to cut it. Same thing with the intake manifold, if it was going to look just right it had to be fabricated from a period piece. I managed to come across several different sets of aftermarket aluminum heads, although a lot of early supercharged Flatheads used the stock cast iron Merc head. The Offenhauser heads had the right look, and nice finning, as well as a m***ively thick deck and a good looking "as cast" combustion chamber. I had found from my 7X Hudson building that traditional relieving was a waste of time, and usually detrimental to the overall breathing versus compression / flame travel curve I was able to devise a novel sinusoidal based relief for my 8X Hudson, which was relatively shallow, and 7 degrees to the valve head, or perpendicular to the cylinder bore axis. The crowding of everything else to regain the compression lost by relieving is more restrictive than the limited benefits afforded by the relieving process.The Offenhauser Heads had a nice area for upward airflow, which is actually the way air does exit a poppet valve, and not the wishful thinking 180 waterfall turn optimistically ground into an awful lot of blocks in the pre air flow data days. I also decided on the GMC 4-71 Blower as the unit of choice, it was slightly bigger than the 3-71 used on a few of the famous lakes cars, but then I didnt want to have to overdrive it to get good boost at low RPMs on a street engine, and it was period to the Late Flathead Era, circa 1955, and I could machine a drive for it similar to the Yates-Newmire drive that I had admired in the old photos. Lucky for me, a batch of NOS 4-71 housings came up as available, and I got one with a 10/ 55 date stamp still on it, that is pretty darn close to what I had decided to build. Armed with an engine block and a blower, I needed to fabricate an intake to work and to look right, again I was fortunate to run across a fairly rare D&S twin two-barrel intake which went into the milling machine for surgery, a machined blower base plate and some judicious TIG welding later produced a suitable and good looking blower intake from a period piece. A vintage style Ford V-8 valve spring anti-backfire valve was added under the blower baseplate, just like the originals. I am partial to having some runner length in my blower manifolds as well, they really add driveability to a S/C engine, whereas the more common straight dump blower manifolds often leave something to be desired in that area. The carbs were going to be period as well, but I wanted something a little more modern that the 97s or 94s seen on nearly all Flatheads. Besides, the 97s were from an earlier era in my opinion, I was building a 1955 era engine, so I chose a pair of Carter WGD two-barrels from an early Olds Rocket V-8. These two-barrels were just right, as they have very narrow but tall float chambers, and fit front to back exactly atop and centered on the 4-71 Blower openings. The WGD has a "secret" advantage over the 97 / 94 in that the throttle bores are a bigger 1 5/16" to the 97's 1 1/4" These carbs were going to look great, and provide sufficient CFMs to feed the blower without resorting to multiple smaller bore 97s on an ungainly fabricated topper on the blower, or the totally non-streetable single jet mechanical fuel injection of the period. I started mocking up the engine externally with the blower housing, and trying to decide on how to proceed with building a period Gilmer belt drive that allowed the use of the dual Ford water pumps without extending out a foot from the front of the block. I began to see that this was not going to be easy to keep the cl***ic look of the dual pumps along with the Gilmer drive for the blower. I hated the 348 / 409 water pump mod I have seen, it wasnt period, and it wasnt pretty. Serpentine belt was easy, but didnt look at all right on a Flathead. So I decided the only way to go was to put the Gilmer belt as close as I could to the front of the block, and run the water pump belt behind it on machined deep aluminum pulleys. The Mark One eyeball said it would fit if I did it exactly right, and a sigh of relief could be heard when it all went together the first time and lined up perfectly. The bullet shaped aluminum billet pulleys on the dual water pumps look great, and the 2 Gilmer belt drive is as close coupled as possible to make a package that will fit in most Rods without a lot of grief. Now the issue became how to build a period Gilmer belt drive that looked Professional but also period. This was a pretty radical idea in 55. The earliest article I've run across that mentions positive belt drive blowers appears in the Sept 55 issue of Auto Age. The article says that vee belt deterioration, slipping, and stretching cause more problems than the entire (blower) system is worth ! Looking closely at the Yates-Newmire drive, I found a listing for available 3/8 pitch industrial pulleys which looked like they held promise, but the only ones available were ¾ wide. So it was index and stack three of them to get the 2 wide pulleys it takes to drive a 4-71 at full boost. Things we take for granted like positive Supercharger Drives were not easy to come by back in the Golden Age. No wonder there were so few of them built (Blown Flatheads) that they were commonly known by the names of the builders who created them. Curiously, the Chrysler Hemi was getting the Big 6-71 GMC blowers driven off the front of the crank around this time, ( Potvin drive) to get around the vee belt issue and to provide a low profile, but those long intake runners necessitated by that configuration must surely have been pretty detrimental to performance through severe boost lag, and crankshaft torsionals must have been brutal on blower gears. A Ford crank pulley looked like it held promise, as there were no harmonic balancers on the venerable Flathead V-8, so it looked like the way to proceed would be to reverse the crank pulley, machine off the second belt groove (I understand that later Ford V-8s used two belts to drive the water pumps and generator instead of the earlier single belt that ran around the crank, water pumps, and generator in a diamond pattern), slightly modify the front of the aluminum distributor housing to get the water pump drive pulley all the way back as close as possible to the front of the block, and drive the two water pumps with a single belt using machined aluminum extra deep water pump pulleys. The reversed crank pulley then had a snout that could be machined to a Morse Taper to stack the Industrial pulleys and lock them together in sync. The first step was to stack the three industrial pulleys, line them up with a Gilmer belt, and bore a pair of .250 X 2 long dowel pin holes to ***ure they stayed exactly in sync with each other. Then, they were unstacked and each bored with an increasing diameter Morse taper to exactly match the crank pulley, while each went individually into an interference fit on the Morse taper as it nestled next to its neighbor. All the while, the dowel pins keep the three pulleys lined up as they are pressed on. A machined plug at the front that pressed into the crank pulley and carried the pulley retaining bolt completes the crank drive package. The same scenario was repeated on the Blower end, a Morse tapered shaft was machined to carry the other three .750 wide Gilmer belt pulleys, aligned by dowels, and machined to the correct taper on the ID to match the shaft. A blower drive shaft was machined to accept tapered roller bearings on either end, and a precision thickness sleeve completes the package, so as to properly preload the bearings and bring the Morse tapered pulleys onto the tapered shaft at precisely the correct distance to be cinched by a Br*** nut at the front of the drive. An aluminum idler pulley and mount was machined to adjust the belt tension, and was affixed to the front of the D&S intake manifold utilizing the generator mount ears. Careful machine work and judicious practice created a Genuine Period custom GMC Gilmer belt drive, the way it was done in 1955. The NOS 1955 4-71 Blower housing and the unique supercharger and water pump drives create a one-of-a-kind look that really says Genuine Hot Rod Flathead Ford V-8 Moving inside the short block the next decisions involved trying to get an accurate forged blower piston that could be used on the stock 8BA rods and Merc 4.00 crank. Lots of cast pistons exist, and a set of Jahns early castings were dismissed as candidates because of concerns over their projected reliability, but the solution appeared through the uncanny timing of a reproduction set of slugs replicated Art Sparks famed ForgedTrue design. Art was a circle track legend, and the father of the forged racing piston, he went so far as to rent time in Boeings aircraft forge after WWII to make his first Offy pistons. One of his supercharged 6 cyl. engines won Indy in 1946, but his ForgedTrue Offy pistons became the rage of the late 40s, 50s and 60s. I had the pleasure of meeting Art early in my engine building career, when I was one of the last (and youngest) Turbo Offy builders His lifetime of work into those engines produced the DGS version (Drake Goosen Sparks), which would produce 1000 BHP reliably for 500 miles, from 160 cubic inches. Only the fuel mileage restrictions placed on Indycars in the early 70s due to the first OPEC oil crisis led to the demise of the unconquerable Turbo Offy, a tribute to men of Sparkss caliber that saw the venerable 4 cylinder go from roughly 325 HP from the normally aspirated 270 to over 1000 BHP (touching 1200 BHP for qualifying) from the destroked 161s in their lifetime of race engineering. ForgedTrue replica pistons it would have to be for the Supercharged Flathead V-8. part II The Saga Continues The more I researched the Flathead Ford V-8, the more impressed I became with both the knowledge that was gained through experimentation, and the love that everybody who ever worked on those engines had for it. Maybe Henry Ford had really created a level playing field for mechanics, where everybody started off with roughly the same hardware, and then the individual talent took over. Paging through my growing collection of Flathead books I became increasingly excited about hopping back into this era and trying my hand at building a stout one, but without resorting to the lure of using technology that wasn't available to the Golden Age rodder. I decided that 1955 would be the year I would shoot for, as it technically marked the beginning of the end for the reign of the Flathead, with the birth of the small Chevy. As previously noted, 1955 brought the Gilmer belt into the picture, so it seemed logical to use the biggest blower I could put on a Ford V-8 without using up too much power to drive it. I settled on the GMC 4-71 as an upgrade to the S.C.O.T., Frenzel, McCullough, and more common 3-71 and it's Speedomotive derivitive. I found a 10 / 55 dated 4-71, and as reported, had the 9 / 55 Auto Age article introducing the Gilmer belt drive, so I really appreciated Leroy Newmire's state-of-the-art engine of that vintage. The pistons were located, and the stock 8BA 7.00" rods had a darn good reputation for being sturdy enough to live under a blower. The 8BA rod introduced the modern rod bearing, all the previous Flatheads had used a full floating bearing, which I didn't see as the hot ticket in a blower engine. And better yet, good bearings were available for it. My Merc crank cleaned up at .010 / .010, and the second block I sent through the hot tank revealed no cracks (the first one was completely broken up at the inside bottom of the water jacket, where water had been allowed to freeze. Armed with the essentials, it was time to prepare a block for the Blown 8BA. One thing that has changed since the Golden Age was unleaded fuel, so it looked like at least hard exhaust seats would be necessary. I chose an 1 5/8" seat, 7/32 deep. Since the block was too big to fit in the local Serdi valve machine, I had to fixture it in the Bridgeport to put the seats in it, with a boring head. As big a pain as this is, it's probably the way it had to be done in 55, if one wanted seat inserts. Rumor has it that some Fords had hard seats in them, but mine did not. Reading through the history books, it seemed that the best blower cam available at the time was an Ed Winfield grind, called the SU-1. I asked Ron Iskenderian what that grind was, but he didn't know off hand, but he did say he would try to find out for me. He gave me a short history of Isky cams for the Flathead, and he also volunteered to touch up a couple of Ford cams I found for the purpose, as he still has the original masters on the shelf. The two cams I have are a 1021 Isky 3/4 race cam which both he and I feel will be great for the blower engine, and a 404, which required special radiused tappets, as the lobes were so large they approached the tappet off the tappet face, and would get into the sharp edge of the tappet instead of contacting the tappet wear surface first. Ron led me through the installation of the radius tappet for my reference. The radius tappet has a groove in the side, which rides against a "staple" installed in the tappet bore. This was accomplished by drilling two holes in the side of each tappet bore, inserting the staple, and bending the tangs over to hold it in place. Then the tappet, when inserted, cannot rotate, so the radius remains in the right direction. This was similar to the OFFY tappet, which featured a square key silver soldered to the side of the bucket, and which ran in a groove broached into the cam housing, same idea, different application. Since a milder cam is always desirable in a blower engine, it seemed that that 3/4 race 1021 would do the trick nicely. Speedway Motors supplied an aluminum cam gear to replace the stock fiber toothed gear, and the price was right as well. Thanks go out to Speedy Bill Smith for still supporting the Ford V-8 after all these years. One of the problems ***ociated with installing the traditional "reground" cam was the loss in base circle diameter due to the regrinding. That poses a problem in the Ford, because the stock tappets are not adjustable. Like the OFFY, the Ford V-8 required that the valve stems be ground to length to achieve the proper clearence. Unlike the OFFY, the V-8 valve, spring, retainer, and guide comes out as a unit, held in place with a horseshoe type retainer on the top of the rather large diameter guide. A rather novel approach in my opinion, I had never seen anything quite like that setup. The inline Chryslers and Hudsons I had built had conventional guides and construction, only in the block instead of in the head like a OHV engine. The Ford valve and guide ***embly is easily installed and removed using a long prybar with the proper guide gripping slot at the end. It does, however, present a bit of a concentricity problem when precisely grinding seats, as the guide is not an interference fit in the guide bore. A rubber seal surrounds the guides to prevent oil from being drawn into the intake ports. Getting back to the non-adjustable nature of the tappets, a reground cam has too small a base circle to utilize the stock length valves and attain the correct clearance. On grinds other than that radical Isky 404, the solution has been install longer stemmed valves, or use the famous Johnson adjustable lifters which have been available on and off forever it seems. Unfortunately, they are again out of production, so a suitable replacement had to be found, or else it was order custom length valves and grind the stems to fit. Valve diameter has been discussed at length in other tomes on the Flathead, but the peculiar breathing characteristics of a flathead (sidevalve) engine don't necessarily hold true to the rule that bigger is always better. It seems that the largest valve which can physically be made to fit causes back side shrouding problems where the valve head is adjacent to the pocket in the cylinder head. Latest wisdom says that 1.600 diameter valves are just about right, and they also leave enough room for the hard exhaust seats. The other legendary modification performed to most Hot Rodded Flathead Fords, generous relieving, is also perhaps detrimental to air flow. I found this out working with the Hudson engines, in the 50's it was rather common to grind as deep a relief as was possible to get in the block, ending just above the top piston ring. All the airflow data I had ever seen would contradict that, as air will not readily exit a poppet valve and make a 180 degree turn, the poppet valve exits air in an upward direction, so it would seem that a lot of filing and grinding done in the past was more wishful thinking than airflow improvement. besides, it lost compression as well by increasing combustion chamber volume. I much preferred to do my airflow improvements in the head than cut a deep relief in the block. My Hudson 8X has a very wide but relatively shallow relief, actually the floor of the relief takes on a sinusoidal wave shape as it follows tangentially to the valve seat radius. I decided that what worked in the Hudson would work equally well in the Ford. I would unshroud the backside of the valves by a radius cut in the rearmost wall of the chamber in the cylinder head, and make sure that the valves stayed at least .060 -.080 from the head at the top when at maximum lift, not because of valve float because the flathead doesn't chase the valve heads with the pistons like an OHV, but to gain airflow over the tops of the valves, from the "away", or shrouded edge of the valve. A set of Isky dual springs would adequately control the valvetrain up to at least 6000 RPM, and that was sufficient for a blown engine. So much has been written and tried as regards porting the Flathead, it's hard to separate conjecture from reality. Port splitters installed into the siamesed center single exhaust port, radical grinding of the curved end exhaust ports, various brazing and welding operations, alternative port exits through major block surgery, all manner of attempts have been made to make the Ford V-8 port flow additional air. After looking at this area closely, it seemed that there were two alternatives. One was to clean up the ports as well as possible, do a little bowl work by judiciously machining the top of the large valve guides, and supercharge it. The other was to reverse the flow, raise the blower on a pedestal manifold, build log type runners down each side to feed the (former) exhaust ports with compressed air from the base of the supercharger through fabricated aluminum ducting, and then exit the exhaust from the former intake ports through a low lying bundle of snakes exhaust system, kept as close to the block as possible, and heat shield the blower from the exhaust using stainless steel shields and ceramic coatings on the exhaust tubing. I settled on the former approach as the blower sitting up an extra 3" from it's present location might look a little top heavy, but maybe the next engine I build will try that configuration. Reverse flow Fords have been around since the 40's, with varying degrees of success attained, the most adventurous one I have seen has recently made quite an impact at the Bonneville salt flats, reaching nearly 300 MPH. I am extremely impressed with that effort, but the technology and parts used to create that fabulous engine were simply not available in the 1955 timeframe, so if I were to build a reverse flow Ford, it would be true to that earlier vintage from a construction standpoint. I thought I had built a rather state-of-the-art SOHC Chevy for Indycar racing in the early 80's, but I was really blown away by the 4 cam DOHC converted Flathead Ford V-8, entered by Bob Estes, and run at Indy in the early 50's The pattern making was superb, and the engine came off looking like the fabulous centrifugally supercharged NOVI V-8 built by Ed and Bud Winfield in 1941. I understand that the NOVI used a three main bearing crank similar to the Ford V-8 crank, and in it's long, legendary, but remarkably unlucky career at Indy, eventually made 825 BHP in 1963. There's not much relevance here, but it is rather astounding that the basic Ford design laid down in 1932 was actually capable of incredible power when outfitted with aftermarket cylinder OHV or OHC heads and supercharged. Far more common than the one-off DOHC conversions were the ARDUN converted Fords. Zora Arkus Duntov, the Father of the Corvette, actually started out by designing an OHV conversion for the Flathead Ford to be used in trucks, eventually it became the coolest Hot Rod accessory of all time. Apparently it was used with a special head gasket that sealed off the sidevalve compartment in the block, and used a pair of overhead valves in large but great looking cylinder heads that now carry an enviable mystique about them. An ARDUN Ford is simply incredible to behold. Looking at that layout, I think I would have tempted to use the stock head gasket, and used both ARDUN valves as intakes, and both "in block" valves as exhausts, for a 4 valve F head configuration, but the cam and lifter arrangement would have needed a little re-engineering to make it work. PART III SOMETHING A LITTLE DIFFERENT Faced with 1955 conditions, it is always a great reminder that this sport was totally different then than it is nowadays. I'm not sure that Hot Rodding is even remotely similar in scope and concept to what it once was. In today's world, you can buy what you need to go fast. The emphasis now is in the details, for instance, Show Cars now display hundreds of nuance variations in form and line, creases and reveals modified ever so slightly to alter the total look of the vehicle. Paint has evolved, re-evolved, and de-evolved. Rather different from the early days, when the emphasis was on performance rather than appearance. Truthfully, since the average Joe no longer drives a Model A, a 32 HiBoy with a Full House Flathead is no longer the cutting edge in performance. I suppose that one might rectify that by hollowing out a 239 Ford and inserting say, a 16,700 RPM Ford Cosworth XB inside, but that's not the point. I wanted to find a new direction for my creative urge, but love the timeless Cl***ic look of the early Ford cars. And so I have embarked on what may be new territory, carefully hand crafting the one-off look of early speed equipment, with nuance improvements in over all esthetics. The more Speed Parts I build, the more I come to appreciate the engineering and imagination that went into Hot Rodding the Flathead Ford V-8. In essence, it seems to me that the Ford V-8 is like a "universal" canvas for one's perception of art. There exists a feeling of timelessness as I add my contribution to the others' renditions, it feels good to apply the design, machining, and fabrication techniques I perfected in over 20 years of Indycar Racing to the Ford V-8. If I can compare it to anything, it's like working with wood. It's a timeless medium. http://www.uncommonengineering.com
road devil thank you i got a hard on when i opened the page and seen that flathead i want mine to look like that. your the man. i now have a goal and that is to run a blower on my flathead look out ya'll cause i will be blowen by.
anyone have any pics of a centrifugal blower on a flathead for him, I think those look the sweetest. I have a pic saved somewhere, if I find it ill post. Briggs
If your looking for a book. Motorbooks International sells one on doing a naturally aspirated, blown and Ardun conversion. All photos are in color and suppliers are mentioned. It is by George McNicholl. I bought it in Canada for forty bucks, so you should pay around 30 US. The book is unreal and well worth the money.
RD13 - That's actually a Frenzel supercharger - the McCulloch was a vertical mount, but similar in shape. JFYI... Mutt
Yeah that was why I had said Mcculloch "style" I knew it wasnt a Mcculloch, but I am not all that familiar with all the old school vert mount superchargers. Thanks for the update!
Here are a couple of pictures of a centrifugal unit mounted in a 1937 Ford. I believe these pictures were taken in the late 40s or early 50s. A.J.
If you still want to run a 4-71 GMC blower, consider the Navarro manifold. Barney recently sold the rights to his equipment to Max Herman at H&H who has a website just for the Navarro stuff. Try this link for the manifolds. http://www.navarroengineering.com/manifolds.html The Navarro manifold is best because it has a pop-off valve for overpressurization or back-fire. You can also adapt a different blower if you need to because you can't find a useable 4-71.
Hi Guys, A number of HMABers here are running 4-71 blown flatheads: Rat******* and FlatOz are two here local to me. Mitchel (New Zealand) are doing manifolds considerably cheeper then the Navaro units. Danny
Hey guys, Those pics, and the article, are of my blown flatty. Call me anytime if you need anymore info. It now has a Hilborn 2 port instead of the carbs. Steve does great work. Doc. 318-773-5998
Gr*** hopper.....Here is one of Joe Abbin's setups on my 3w....just down the road from you. ****er makes a different engine out of the Flathead !!! I love it!!! Give me a call sometime.....easier than this typing stuff. Skot
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