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Old 11-20-2014, 04:26 PM   #223
skorpioskorpio
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Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Posts: 1,018
Re: Project Madera: A Jimmy GT

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dagobah View Post
I'm fascinated by your project. Before reading this thread, I hadn't heard anything about the atlas motor. Not that changing directions at this point in the project would be a good idea, but had you ever considered something like this?

It seems like you're already doing a ton of fabricating, and I'm assuming that 3-d printing is only going to make one-off parts like this more affordable. Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing more progress in your project.
Looks a bit like the Ryan Falconer engine:



which is based on the 250/292 bottom end and along with the Atlas was used in GMs Baja and Pikes Peak racers. GM built it with Ryans help and Ryan retained ownership of the design (or bought it out) and now sells them for about $50,000 bare. In this program both of these engines in turbo form were pushing 700-850 HP during that program and dominated both events even against teammate trucks running Chevy V8s. The injection is available as an off the shelf product from Kinsler for the Falconer engine.

All that said I decided on what I did for a few reasons, one I felt it important to use a GM engine in my project, two I didn't want a push rod engine, three the Northstar has issues and in the end still sounds like a typical cross crank V8 (bubba-da-bubba-da...) and four GM never made a production V10 or V12, OK not a modern V12, the GMC V12 is actually a twin V6 and weighs near a ton.

You know putting anything in one of these trucks that isn't a variation on the original theme to what came in them is blasphemy to many so in the end putting a GM truck engine in a GM truck seemed like the way to go. There will always be the occasional, well my sisters cousins husband who works on these things all the time says that those engines are junk and you should have used a small block, garbage. Fact is that among the small community that are swapping these engines in, they consider 100,000 mile engines low milage, and there are others running these at the strip running high boost turbos and 800+HP and spinning them up past 10,000 rpm and I've heard no stories from that crowd about *any* catastrophic failures at all.

Last edited by skorpioskorpio; 11-20-2014 at 04:31 PM.
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