Advantages/Drawbacks of Secondary Removal

[BennyZ]

The topic tells the question...

Thanks!
Ben

[Z Factor]

Hello Ben, and welcome to the forum.

What advantage were you hoping to accomplish?

Possibilities of off line Tq with stock cubes.

[mrcrowley]

Ben-I PMed you. Please don't hesitate to call me with questions you may have!

Thanks,

Mike Ebert

[rkreigh]

Originally Posted by mrcrowley

Ben-I PMed you. Please don't hesitate to call me with questions you may have!

Thanks,

Mike Ebert

I have a 390 and an really strongly considering this. I don't want to pull the heads, but I have the bifurcation porting and believe I could open up the ports on the injector housings and intake just a bit more and get some nice gains.

with the 4.10 gears, and bigger displacement, I don't think the sacrifice in low rpm torq will hurt much, and I would gain some nice top end pull.

right now even with some serious gumballs, traction is a problem, so rocking the torq curve up into the rpm band may actually make the car hook and go a bit faster.

the secondary system on the lt5 is a bit of a PITA, and someone else could use the actuators.

mike and others seem to have the programming end of it down pat, so on the big strokers I think it might be the way to go. On a 368 or stock displacement, I don't think it's all that good an idea, unless you go with the 4.10s to make up for the loss of low end torq. chevy invested big bucks in this system to give the car smooth acceleration.

I know on the snake skinner (which had the DRM RB cams, 4.10 gears, stock displacement), they removed the secondaries and it worked pretty well.

on the bigger stroker LT5s, I think the engine is "air starved" until the secondaries open, and with the gains in port size, I think ditching the secondaries might be the hot ticket. key is matching the head porting which would be the time to do it!!

mike definitely picked up quite a bit of power by going this route on the "poor mans 396" engine.

he's getting stroker power numbers with a big bore, stock cams, and great flowing intake and heads. it all adds up to a very docile combination that is cheaper to build than a stroker. the big crank and cams are VERY pricey, and I still love the stock idle quaility of the stock cams.

like to hear more about this, I am about ready to take the plunge on this after carlilse before the winter nap.

after riding in George B. sgc 368 with the secondaries removed, I didn't notice any problems at all the car pulls like a bear. Mike's 396 is a force to be reckoned with as well!!!

any other thoughts???

[BennyZ]

Thanks. Great to be here...

The ulltimate goal is, of course, to make this thing scream. My goal is to hit 11's. Right now all I have are a set of flowmasters and K&N. I just took posession of the car and was looking around to see what kind of mods can be had to up the power. Right now, I'm looking at just the basic i/h/e combo and some other basics (180 deg stat, chip), then I'm probably going to take the plunge and go for something serious. As far as experience with cars goes, I have built a couple of imports, assisted friends with camaros and T/A's mostly (completed a '96 383 LT1 swap into a 91 Camaro RS along with other stuff rear end swap, drum->disc conv, etc., etc.) and done a few nitrous kits, so I'm not a newbie to the performance scene, just to something like a ZR-1. This is a car with a lot of sentimental value, so I want to keep it as nice as possible as it has under 30k and will be in storage for most of the year anyway. If I ever do decide to go to the extreme, it would be some kind of monster twin-turbo setup.

So basically, I want to hit 11's and keep my options open for forced induction somewhere down the road. If secondaries are that much of a pain without much of an advantage, I may skip out on it, but when everything's apart, other port work could be done at the same time, right? This may make it worthwhile if there are no drivablility issues associated with this type of mod.