Best cam for the street both power & sound
Plan on adding
Long tube headers
Edelbrock Dual plane intake
Holley 650 carb
Keeping the bottom end stock
If you are starting with a low-compression engine, like a 73-up;
How many times, has a guy come on FABO, and said "stock bottom end";
then come back afterwards crying how gutless the bottom end is?
All your go fast goodies are designed to increase the power by making the engine able to breath better at high rpm. At the same time, with a low compression bottom end, efficiency falls off the scale, and you get a dog engine in the rpm range in which it will spend the vast majority of it's life.
When this happens to you, assuming that yur starting with an 8/1 engine;
take the engine apart and pump the Compression ratio up, which is the very first thing you should be doing.
Bottom end, that is to say power below 3000 rpm, in a given engine, is governed by cylinder pressure.
A factory stock 73-up smog 318 barely made 135>140 psi depending on altitude mostly. So it was already born with a feeble bottom end.
Putting a cam into it two or three sizes bigger than stock is gonna drive the cylinder pressure down even further into old dog nearly dead-dog territory.
and the lack of a decent stall which you didn't mention, and the 3.23s are gonna keep you in dying dog territory , every time the rpm drops under about 3000>3500 rpm.
Low rpm performance doesn't even start until 150>155psi
Oh sure that big-overlap cam idles like a powerhouse, but it takes a long time to wind it up. OK wait, to be fair with 3.23s and 27" tires, 3500rpm will be ~35mph, and with cylinder pressure down in the low 120 psi zone, she ain't agonna spin the tires, so yur just gonna have to wait for the engine to come up on the pipe . Tic-tic-tic- aw forget it, I'm going home. I wouldn't even bother installing headers on that thing.
Listen, I'm 71 years old, and I've done what yur thinking of doing, not once, but twice, and the result was always the same, the 73-up 318 turned into a dog below 3500 rpm.
I learned my lesson. With a stock feeble bottom end, just install 4.10s or better, and a 2800 Convertor, and leave the rest alone. $500 bucks and I had a rocket! even on the 2bbl.
Oh and whatever you do, DO NOT install a 114 LSA cam, nor a 112; even a 110 in your Low-compression 318 is just asking for trouble.
What you need in that slug, is a solid lifter, fast rate of lift, tight lash, short LSA cam, and you won't get much lift with a cam like that, so it is what it is, But stay away from any cam with an LSA greater that 110; it will just kill your cylinder pressure.
Or you can just do what everyone else does, which is to install a hi-stall convertor.....