Buick 455 good, bad or ugly

This reminds me of a conversation that took place when my buddy was having the heads done for his GS.
A good friend of Big Chief's on here has an engine machine shop that does all my work. He did the heads on that 455.....
Big Chief told me they were talking once about, i believe it was Chief's BBF Mustang...His buddy who own's the shop had his hands in that mill and told him "it'll outrun most street cars....but beware of the Girl Scout"
Girl Scout= Gran Sport (GS)
Basically, i'm pretty sure he was saying, that Buick 455 has what it takes to make ya look bad.......I rode it that Mustang too, it ran HARD..

I wish i could remember exactly how it went...Chief may just chime in.....it was good.

I got the biggest kick outta that!....

 

carefull with the high pressure kits. if your bottom end is solid and keeps halfway decent pressure, a high pressure pump kit can send your pressure up and over 95psi cold, and it WILL eat up your front cam bearing, so make damn sure you match the relief valve spring to the pressure. TA makes an adjustable one, but they arent too hard to pull appart and install the shorter springs

 

FiddyFour, what year are your exhaust manifolds?

 

True.

 

72 exhaust manifolds on 71 heads

 

Many thanks.

 

sure thing... they look funny? lol

 

Pretty is as pretty does . . . which is a pretty frickin' strange comment.

Reason I wanted to know is, the 31 is getting close to firing up with the stock dummy block - which turns out to be a low mileage engine - and the car run for a while with it while I build the "serious" engine.

Not too serious, a streeter with maybe 460 HP.

Then again, in a 2200# car, maybe serious....


Anyhoo, thought the exh manifolds would save some time over doing headers right now.

Headers don't do a heckuva lot until you slide by 3000 rpm at full throttle.


I did hold the 68 headers up to the 32's dummy 430 engine when I was building it.
They look like they would flow well, but the dumps were too far back and interfered with the 32's toeboard.

 

gotcha

ok, well in that case...

the driver side dump IS a bit forward on the 71's, but the p***enger side dumps right up tight to the toe board. i had to wack about an extra 2" down on the bottom of the firewall/top of the toe board in the willys to get the p***enger side to fit.

here you can get a good idea of how far back the p***enger side dumps

 

Red engines . . . look good.

Thanks for the pic, looks like the same problem I had with the 32.


Maybe headers would be best now.
Don't really want to cut the toeboards etc. up.

Here's a mockup of some Sprint car headers, these shouldn't take too long.


If I can get the pics from the old computer out, there's an A roadster on 32 frame running a set of these at Bonneville.
I'll see what's up with that later and post the pic if I can.

Looks pretty good and the nice part is, this style header free's up a lot of room under the car.

 

Very good motor, parts are still available including performance stuff from http://www.taperformance.com/