compression on a 318
It sounds like KB167s would do what I hoped to accomplish. I'm not going drag racing with this car but it would be nice to get compression up to 9.2 to 9.5 as long as I'm replacing pistons anyway. Thanks for all the info.
Be careful what you wish for.
The static compression ratio is nothing more than a tool, to achieve a target cylinder pressure with the intake closing angle of the cam. Those two work together, and if you arbitrarily increase one without the other, you can very quickly run into detonation problems.
Wiki says you are at 381ft elevation
Wallace says with the stock cam, 9.5Scr will get you to 172.5 psi cranking cylinder pressure. I guarantee you that with the stock heads, you will have detonation problems.
Working the Wallace backwards, at 9.5Scr she wants a cam with an Ica of about 10* later. With a stock cam, you are already pushing the detonation wall with an Scr of 9.0.
The point is this; You gotta co-ordinate the pressure with the Ica, and the tool for that is the Scr. So as you say you are not going drag-racing, You gotta be real careful. It's the pressure that makes the car fun to drive/ forget about a particular Scr. Just shoot for a pressure you know that you can buy gas for.
If you target too high a pressure, and you go down in elevation, detonation comes earlier.
If you target too low a pressure, and you go to a higher elevation, then you will feel the loss of power.
If your car is forced to operate at multiple wildly varying elevations, IMO, it is best to get a bigger engine. For example ; each 1000 ft is worth about 5 psi, so a difference of 4000 ft is worth about 20 psi. And that is a huge powerloss