Forgive me for the ignorant question, but what exactly is meant by describing a Flathead as "full house" or "full race"? Beyond the obvious of perhaps bore/stroke, cam, and heads, is there something more specific to the build of the motor or are those descriptive terms just indicative of a performance oriented flathead v8?
You have pretty much covered it. The only other ones if you want to go all out are. An Ardun overhead valve conversion kits or a blower. Ardun's are about ten grand and I don't know what a blower cost.
It means that it is balls to the walls. Running right on the ragged edge of grenading. Is there more to building a hot one that bore stroke and heads? Well yea you can go really extreme with them, port work, changing the direction of the flow completely, reshaping the combustion chamber, or relieving the heads, camshaft, blower injection. Basically anything can be done to a flathead as can be done with any other motor just with less return for your time and labor. What is generally called a full house flatty is basically what you described but there is so much that one can do if he just knows how.
The term "full house or full race" is used pretty loosely in flathead circles.You start with an engine that has 90-100-110 h.p. As a stocker.You increase the bore(I have encountered 2 separate engines that were bored.250 and streetable) change the stroke to 4 in or 4 1/8 or 4 1/4,change out the cam,lifters,bigger valves,relieve the cylinders to breath better(flatheads don't react well to high compression) open up the intake track,make the exhaust ports bigger and a good runner will furnish approximately175-200 h.p. With about 250 ft lbs of torque. In my opinion(my opinion only) anything above these h.p figures and torque figures would be considered full race or full house. Joe Abbin has a 335 h.p. Motor(blower equipped) that runds mid 12's at the track in a 34 sedan,yet has been seen on a few local Rod runs and outings. Kenny Kloth had a 50-51 Merc that had compression ratios around 5-5 1/2 and still managed to run 20-30 m.p.h. Faster than a roadster that was significantly lighter(Bonneville racer) No one(1) modification is going to turn a flatmotor into a "killer",it takes many small steps to get to 200 h.p. And it's a lot more expensive than building an overhead valve with300 plus h.p.
porkn******, FlatheadJohn: Thanks for your feedback.it really does help. You guys confirmed my su****ions. I don't have much experience with flatheads other than the stock '39 Fordor I rewired for a guy, but that motor was sewing machine quiet. It would be fun to see/hear Joe's flathead monster at full wail blasting down the drag strip.
Back in the day when flatheads ruled, "full house" = "full race", meant a motor built specifically for racing applications and therefore marginal for the street. Poor idle, excessive fuel consumption, etc. "3/4" described the hottest flathead you could expect to run well on the street. Just saying.
Thank you lucas for the info; what you said makes good sense and it also defines the whole "3/4" term I've heard tossed about over the years.
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