Ford 302 V8 Engine Assembly - Summit Stroker

Seems like the Ford 302 V-8 engine is all but forgotten. It also seems the new standard for building a sweet Dime is to put a V-8 in your S-10 truck. With all these Dime minis sporting big powerplants and boneyards full of 5.0L engines, why not build a Dime-smoking Ranger?

Most moderately built small-blocks use dual plain manifolds for low-end torque and good driveability. A mild set of heads, ported or un-ported, are normally used for aesthetic or performance reasons. For the most part, these mild builds produce in the range of 425 to 500 hp.

Summit Racing was our one-stop shop for our little pony project. We compiled a list of components to build our stroker 302 and it all showed up via UPS - boy, do we love the Web. All that we had to do was machine the components, check the clearances, and assemble the engine. The unfortunate part of that is we didn't have a full machine shop in the garage, so we took our Summit parts to Superior Automotive in Anaheim, California, and had the crew there work its magic on the Summit shipment.

To keep things on the visual equivalent to the standard street piece, we chose Trick Flow's Track Heat small-block Ford heads. On the flow bench, the Track Heat intake ports flowed 253 cfm at 0.500 lift. The runner wouldn't pull more cfm with any additional lift. In fact, the runner began to cavitate and the flow numbers fell to 249 cfm when the valve was opened to 0.550 with the same 28 inches of vacuum pulling through the runner.

Just as all elements of the engine affect power, the flow numbers have been estimated to support a certain power range. It's been said that 300 cfm is good for about 600 hp. This statement is a generalization, because there are so many other elements that affect power, but it does provide a base of 2 hp per cfm. Of course, the head flow is a result of cam profile, which will largely determine engine manners. Superior Automotive helped us nail this combo down. A smooth-running screamer is what we wanted, so the crew massaged the Trick Flow heads to flow 281 cfm at 0.600 lift.

We also used Edlebrock's Air-Gap manifold that's designed to pull as much as 6,500 rpm. But we found the intake allowed us to see power gains all the way up to 7,100 rpm. The combo made 573 hp at 7,100 rpm. Our combination came out a little above average at 2.04 hp per intake cfm. Here's how the combo went together.

Parts List
This list will vary depending on your combination, but it will provide a good base for you to use for your comb and price range. This of course doesn't include machine work or assembly. Superior Automotive charges $4,000 to build a motor like this. That may seem like a lot, but keep in mind the crew reworked the heads and CNC-machined the block, not to mention all the fine attention to detail. You get what you pay for.