info on some piston rings
You know some guys see these 340 stockers running 10's and think certainly I can do that with a 360 cube motor, But it's much more than that. NHRA gives you blueprint specs, like the crank stroke is 3.31 +/- .015. Now I don't know about you but I'm not spending the money to have my bracket motors crank indexed and stroked to +.014. I would just throw a 4" stroke crank in there. They give you port volumes for the cylinder heads in cc's. Most heads are well below this limit so what do the stocker guys do? They spend a bunch of money to have the ports opened up to the limit (or just under) and then have the ports acid etched, splatter welded and shot peened to make them look like as cast ports. There is nothing left untouched on a good running stocker, everything is examined under a microscope and massaged to the maximum or minimum allowed to gain every and any advantage possible. All those little improvements add up to big gains.
I've learned plenty of other tricks but I don't do most of them to my bracket cars because it's just not worth the effort on them when I can just stick in a bigger cam and get the same results.