Quote Originally Posted by gassersrule_196
so that must mean bigger heads is out of the question??????? what i find truly funny is when people give credit to 305 builds but not 283's HA senseless, you have a pm sc454
Aww come on Scooter, don't hide your answers in a PM. You're among friends here. All of us understand that you have built some very fast 301's and respect you for it.

SC454, here's the scoop. You can build a 283/301 that will scream, if you want to build horsepower in the upper rpm ranges. In order to get a 283/301 to work, you have to rev it. It's all a matter of passing air through the motor. "X" cubic feet per minute passed through a motor equals "X" horsepower. A larger motor (350/383) will pass the same amount of air at lower rpm's than a smaller motor will at higher rpm's. Now, if you have to run a smaller motor at higher rpm's, then you will also have to cam the motor to run at higher rpm's, which means that you will have to raise the static compression ratio so that the intake closing point on the cam matches the c.r. When you run the longer cam, you have a very soggy bottom end (any cam you choose has an effective operating window of about 3,500 rpm's, so it will be effective, for instance, from idle to about 4,200 rpm's or from 1,500 to 5,000 or from 2,000 to 5,500 or 2,500 to 6,000 or 3,000 to 6,500 or 3,500 to 7,000 or whatever) which means you have to run a very loose converter (if you are running an automatic trans) and a lot of rear gear. A four or five speed trans might be a better choice. With the exception of Scooter and a few others on this forum, most of us would counsel you to start with a larger motor so you could keep the revs down, use a more civilized converter and keep static compression low for use with pump gas. Now, that's not to say you couldn't build a screaming 283/301 to run on pump gas, I'm just saying a larger motor will be a better choice for doing what you want to do.