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Stromberg BIG97 dyno thrash
Norm Schenck at Competition Fuel Systems dyno tested Stromberg 97 and BIG97 carburetors for us for year. In fact he had a major hand in developing the BIG97 from scratch.
We set up a dedicated dyno motor at Norm’s facility in Vassar, Michigan and we watched intently as horsepower grew with small tweaks to the carburetion and heads. This set up was with iron vortec heads, that Norm ported himself. We also had a set of AFR CNC ported heads that made more power, though Norm suspected that the limitations of the old-style dual-plane Edelbrock tri-power intake held everything back a little in flow terms.
Want to know the numbers? This is a GM 330 horse crate motor and the best we got this time (by taking off the mufflers) was 404 ft-lbs of torque at 4300rpm and 386HP at 5400rpm. We still made over 400/380 with the mufflers on. This was on 89 octane gas with top end A/F ratios all in the 13s ! The dyno can now read separate A/F ratios per cylinder.
What this motor will do once someone (ie us) develops a new intake for the BIG97s is anyone’s guess. But it will be impressive, you can be sure of that…
