7 Hot Engine Combos

Power—it’s what makes the world go ’round. The politicians and business tycoons can have their world stage and corporate mergers. All hot rodders want is more torque and horsepower. And we’re going to show you how to get it. These power plans are simple. We’ve assembled five muscle-building small-blocks and two Rat-tastic big-blocks to cover the bases from mild to wild street engines. For the mild motors, we aimed at street powerplants with excellent idle quality, great torque, and an emphasis on mileage and throttle response. As you climb the ladder toward wretched excess, we’ve added some suggestions for more torque and horsepower that comes at the cost of a lumpier idle and reduced fuel mileage, but will give your engine a nastier disposition. The baddest combination will focus on all-out normally aspirated power with a single four-barrel induction system. We’ll save the nitrous, superchargers, and turbos for some other day.

For this story, we’ll stick to the classic combination of parts that aim at horsepower heaven. These combinations will detail displacement, compression, cylinder heads, camshaft, intake manifold, carburetor, and header recommendations that will get you where you want to go. These aren’t the only combinations available. These are just ideas that we’ve seen tested or we know would make great power.

The power levels included in each category are ranges. You could make more or less than that depending upon your specific combination. A simple cam change could make a 20hp difference if you dial in the right grind. There are probably a dozen camshaft companies, not to mention numerous producers of cylinder heads, manifolds, headers, and exhaust systems. Our goal here is to outline a few suggestions and then let you decide on your own favorite parts proliferation. Our readers are some of the sharpest engine people out there. Let us know what you think.

Car guys are all the same. As soon as you finish building the engine, you’re already planning the next one. That’s what makes all this so much fun. Build it on paper a few times before you do it for real. So pull on your Bow Tie engine-builder gloves and dive right in to our seven hot engine combos in the sidebars below.