Hey Guys,

I'm building a 4.10 geared car and was wondering how to get the 440 to live at 3500-4500 rpm when I drive it to cruise-ins or car shows? I don't usually drive more than 2 hours to a show or cruise-in. For those times I do drive at highway speeds it will put the engine RPM in that range for an hour or so. How do you build a 440 to spin those RPM's and live?

Thanks for any input!

I like and make sure that I have at least .0030 bearing clearances on both the rods and mains and full groove main bearings along with a oil pan that holds at least 5 quarts in it along with a windage tray and crankshaft scraper
You know the cooling system needs to keep the cooling temps under 230 F also, correct If it is hotter you may want to add a engine oil cooler also to help keep the engine cooling system not works as hard as it is now
Do you have a good oil temp gauge for the engine now? If not it can't hurt to know how much the oil temps are going down the road half way to the track or journeys end

Build it like a boat motor, they often run like that out on the lake. You might consider an oil cooler but other than that a good high performance build should handle it. Keep the compression reasonable, clearances on the high side and use high quality parts in the valve train.

Exactly. Nothing special. Just understand that it will wear our much faster. That you really cannot change.

Cruising at light throttle uses a small fraction of your max power, slightly more than 2.93 gears due to friction/pumping loss.

i'd use as light of pistons, rods, and valve train components as possible. good oiling, good cooling. personally I think the goal is unrealistic, but never say never. I drive a 440 that has all these things and i'd never consider cruising it at 3500+rpm for hours.

In 1968 my dad bought a new ss396 Chevelle with a 4 speed and 4.10’s.
It was the family car.
We lived in nyc at the time and would go to Vermont to go skiing 3 out of 4 weekends a month all winter long.....and it was about a 5hr trip each way.
You drove around at 4K on the highway...... that’s just how it was back then.

One of his good friends had a 67 427/435hp Corvette with 4.56’s for his everyday car.

It just wasn’t that unusual to be turning fairly high rpm as you motored down the road “back in the day”.

I guess what I’m saying is....... what you’re talking about doing was being done day in and day out when these cars were new.

Did you ever consider buying a lower 1st gear for your tranmission and installing say 3.55 gears in you axle? It will still launch hard and save your engine.

413 truck engines ran that RPM range day in and day out on mass production tolerances and that was under constant load. That's the DNA of your 440, a dump truck engine lol. They ran ten lifetimes of going to the Dairy Queen by comparison.

Basically build it for endurance. A boat engine is a good description. Good quality internals, lighter than stock would be good but not NASCAR light. Lots of oil capacity and cooling capacity.

You spin it faster, it wears out faster. Synthetic oil and a good filter will mitigate that some.

Don't get crazy with the camshaft. Big springs and aggressive lobes beat the crap out of the valvetrain. Not such a big deal on an engine that idles and then runs WFO for a few seconds and then idles again. Another thing entirely running 2 hours at half of WFO.

Built like this it will live as long as you can afford to pail fuel into it.

Kevin

A fairly well known recco maximum for extended continuous use is 2,500 feet per minute piston speed.
For a 413/426/440 etc. (3.75" stroke) this occurs at 4,000 RPM.
The noise would bother me more than anything else, 50 years ago my DD was a 383/727/4.89 '63 Belvedere.

You must be young. That is the RPM every muscle car with 4:10s used to drive down the freeway at. Every day. All day. You had no other means of transportation.

Cars came the factory with 4.11’s. Pontiacs could come wi5h 4.33’s....
And people drove them daily.

I'll drive my 440 Cuda at 3500 rpm for however long it takes, which in my case is an hour or less. Longer than that and I'm not really interested in going to a car event. That could change though.

That’s where the power is on a street motor right? No downshifting necessary for passing!

I run 4.30's with a 30" tall tire and when I run the highway and cruise at 60 to 65 mph I turn around 3200 rpm's. I have driven to Carlisle like that which is all the way on the highway and its almost 2 hrs as its about 90 miles. I drive the highway a lot around my area also and have not had any issue's at all. I have been driving on the 493 like that since 2011 and on the 440 like that from 2006 to 2011. Ron

I have built 5 engines that have went into drivers. Interstate driving mostly. I use NAPA brand cam, lifters for a 1975 Dodge or Plymouth police car application. These are hydraulic and have lots of mid range get up and go. Birdtracker

I'd sure want to run a big oil pan and keep the oil away from the rotating assembly, and I wouldn't skimp on the valvetrain.
Early '70s my only car for awhile was my '57 Chevy, 3.00" crank 292, 4.88s & 27" tire. Drove it back & forth about 15 miles each way on a SoCal freeway turning 5000 - 5200 RPM 5 days a week. I don't think I have that in me nowadays, but that car made enough money to put me through computer school and feed itself.
Nowadays, my 1st thought reading the OP was "why do that?", haha. I'd be thinking OD or tall tires...

I was there in the '60's and drove a low geared car every day. we didn't cruise them 4000rpm on the highway. the engines had a life span about half of true daily drivers; which didn't have a long life span.

If you can find a factory build that doesn’t burn too much oil you should be fine.

This is what I recall too Lew. Cars with 3.23 gears were pretty much wore out at 100,000 miles. They were burning oil at 60,000.

The flip side is that today, it's rare for me to actually put more than 2000 miles per year on my muscle cars. So life expectancy never factors into it for me. Like someone else mentioned, I cannot stand listening to them running at higher rpm for extended times.