Another member on here has a motor for sale, and I have some general questions I wanted to ask some of you guys that build motors and have experience with different setups. I am supposed to go look at the motor and hear it run this weekend. The motor is for sale at a great price which has me very interested. What I do know is the motor is 9:1 compression, 288 duration cam, 452 unleaded heads. I have seen a video of the motor running, and it sounds good with a nice lope to it. The seller did not build the motor, so I don't have the exact cam specs. This is the only thing I am concerened with. I am planning on running the 2.94's I have now, and maybe upgrade to 3.23's later down the road. I am not looking to go any lower than that on rear end ratio. I was told that with that motor, I would need a stall converter similar to what came with a HP440, around an 1800-2000 stall. Would a stall like this work well with my gears? From the video and conversation, I figured it has a cam in between these two: http://www.summitracing.com/search/make/...891642%2B400304

Another thing I thought about is simply doing a cam swap if the one in it is too big for what I want. I actually want to drive this car and be able to enjoy it and put miles on it.

it's a little hard to say, since there's some guessing here, but I think you would be fine with that combination. By the way, there were many 440 torque converters, some as high as 2500-2800 from the factory. that would be great, but your mileage would hurt a little

That cam wouldn't be much more wild than a stock magnum cam, but with a reduction in compression and highway gears, you might get into some low speed bogging. but that can be tuned out through the carb with a vacuum secondary, quadajet, thermoquad, demon, etc

I forgot to ask about how a cam similar to this one does on vacuum, as I will still be running power brakes.

Take a Vacuum Guage with you when you go to see / hear the engine run. Also it would be beneficial to have an oil pressure gauge to hook up and measure the Vacuum & Oil pressure at idle and at approx. 2500 - 3000 rpm. A dial back to zero timing light would help too. A Vacuum rating below 10psi or lower at idle will be marginal with power brakes. Record all of your reading and then post them for analysis on this site if you are not sure how to interpret the numbers. Also look down the throat of the carb and see if the primary and secondary throttle bblades on the carb are closed completely at idle. (Do this with the engine off) If they are partially open (beyond the idle transfer slot) then it means the carb is not the optimum match for the cam, and work will be required to correct. the short of it is that the blades can be open too far at idle rendering the idle circuit on the carb useless at idle, and your card idle screws will not function properly. Again post your findings here and ask for help to analyze them. This is a Great Resourse site for answers if you provide accurate details of what you have.
Good Luck !

Bogusracer

I believe there were actually only two torque converters per year and the high stall one had a little paper tag with "Hi Stall" on it. The differences in stall speeds on the chart above is largely explained by engine torque output.

R.

I'm running the bigger Summit cam in a 9.25 compression 440 in my D100 swb pickup. I'm using a Performer RPM intake, Hedman headers, a 750 vacuum secondary Holley(right out of the box), factory hi-stall convertor, 2.94 gears and 26 inch rear tires. This cam has a slight lope, but great street manners and it has stump pulling power. It will cruise at 30 mph all day and yet annihilate the 295/50-15's at will.

Yes, I do run power brakes. I haven't checked how much vacuum it's running, but the brakes work great. I like this cam so much that I'm putting together a 10-1 440 and going to use the same cam from Summit in it. It's one of the best all around street cams I've ever run.

If you have a particular grind you like, sometimes you can go with a more aggressive rocker ratio and get even more out of your heads with no worse drivability. Just watch out for Piston to valve clearance

Last year, we built a 440 for my Cuda and built it pretty much to stock only we used a fairly tame CompCams 262 Int./270 Exh. 462 Int./.470 Exh.;Lobe 110 deg. I am also using an RPM Performer intake.

I can smoke the 275/60s with ease in 1-3 gear and 4th with a little effort and the car cranks up instantly even on cold days, idles fairly smooth and has great manners and great performance (we pulled 390 on the Dyno)

452 Heads with a Port Job (from the Mopar Templates) stock sized valves and we used new pistons that gave us a 9:1. With a moderate 750 Holley it dyno'd at 390 hp. I run the HP Exhaust manifolds but the engine shop used headers for their tests. I also run an Eddie carb now.

Here are the numbers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQzcBniEGkA

Here is a short clip of the engine running on the dyno
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T75EW-_v3PE

I run a 4 speed with 4:10 on the rear so I can't help any with the converter but I am happy to share whatever I can about the build. My goal was to make a reliable driver with enough power to keep it fun.