Is More Flow Better, Is The Smallest Intake Port That Flows The Most The Best
You better be careful or
@Rat Bastid will die of elation that someone else get's it lol. Seriously, it's nice to see some smart, articulate people who understand what the hell is going on. I'm guessing some of these guys are getting bad drinking water or something because the stuff they come up with is mind boggling.
LOL.
Whenever people make big or outrageous claims, I like to try and dig through them to understand or debunk them. It helps me make better decisions building my own junk.
There's a lot of rules of thumb or general wisdom that can be explained by physics, but those always break down at some point.
The older wisdom tends to dominate what most know, simply because it's been around longer. But lots of that is also based on a state of the art that's been advanced quite a lot since it was developed. Lots of it simply bad takes published again and again in magazines..
But then there's folks whose claims I almost always find are supported by analyzing the engineering behind it.
@Rat Bastid tends to be one of them. The only issue people seem to have is that they willfully misinterpret his words, are claiming to want a fast car but are proposing to build a dump truck, or they're thinned skinned LOL. There's also too many people who try to convince themselves they can have racecar power and speed with street car shift points and tires and he'll hear none of it. Too many take that personally.
The notion that SBMs have small port cross sections is easy to see even without the maths. Other OEM efforts which produce more output from similar bore and stroke sizes all have bigger valves and larger and better flowing ports. Even the factory efforts to support race teams focused mostly on trying to cram more through the heads (look at every W head for the sb). It's not an accident.
I do have to laugh sometimes because things like rod ratio, port velocity, spring loads, retainer weight and other notions matter a lot - but it takes a very substantial amount of development to figure out how to address each of those in a useful and meaningful way. But no one ever asks how to develop them (except maybe when this thread was started!), they use them as arguments to rationalize their choices to align with a favorite magazine or TV show. Not to mention, there's not much a hobbyist is going to be able to do to change those attributes of a build anyway. Yet they're all convinced they can have a 1/2 priced 700hp small block if they could just choose better from the catalog than their buddy did - "but no custom cams or converters, thank you"
Sorry for the rant.