No additional conversation has taken place about the Tornado with it's current owner, but that hasn't stopped me from wasting even more time on it. We did get the spare Wagoneer (it wasn't a Gladiator) to the shop the other day, turns out it's an AMC 327 under the hood, not a Buick 350. Probably more desirable than a 350 Buick, but not much.
So on to the fun stuff. If you've never used or heard about it, in my experience the Desktop Dyno program is actually a pretty accurate estimator of engines if you can use reliable information on it. I've tried to model several engines that we've had put on an actual engine dyno for the shop in the program and generally it comes out pretty close. Just this past week we got the 389 stroker Pontiac engine we built run on the dyno and it came in the engine made more power in reality than it did on the computer, 492HP to 480HP. Now the reason I bring this up is that I've been trying to figure the Tornado engine out on that program to get a real estimate of what it would do with a blower on it. Someone had done a couple sets of head flow numbers which is half the battle, the bore and stroke and induction and stuff is all pretty easily found online, but I never found any specs on the camshaft used.
I finally decided that since I was going in to work to do some maintenance on my wife and I's vehicles today that I would degree the cam and get some answers finally.
The interesting things here are that the lifts at the valves are different despite being the same cam lobe actuating both intake and exhaust valves. The lifts at the valve are different as well. I checked each point multiple times and measured to .050". There is a margin of error involved in the numbers because I can't be certain that my dial indicator was exactly parallel to the valve, plus I didn't use a degree wheel doing this. It's all based upon timing marks on the balancer. There are 30 degrees marked out on the balancer around TDC and I measured that every 10 degrees of rotation of the crank was 9/16 of an inch, marked the valve events and then string measured based upon those numbers. It's not super precise but I was expecting everything to be a little closer than this. I'm thinking it's an issue with where the rocker arm pivots are in relation to the cam lobe combined with the rocker arms not actually being an equal ratio.
Something else unusual here, and I didn't think to take pictures with the valve cover off, despite being an overhead camshaft engine the valve adjustment is by rocker height adjustment on the ball studs a la Chevy V8. There is a plate that mounts to the same studs that the rocker cover itself bolts to that basically has fingers that fit into the concave cavity of the stamped steel rocker arms to keep them from simply spinning around. Super goofy stuff, you would expect shaft mounted rockers like the XS cylinder head with the same type adjustment or at least I would. That is obviously a possible cause of the variation as well seeing as those fingers aren't well fit at this point, some of them have been repaired in the past even.
Having my numbers I put them into the Desktop Dyno program and what it returned was within 5hp and 5lb ft of what Kaiser had rated the engine at back in the 1960s. They rated it 140hp and 210lb-ft, the computer said 144hp and 214lb-ft. That gave me enough confidence to plug in the specs of the M90 supercharger we had been talking about and playing with drive ratios and what not because it will calculate intake manifold pressure as well to give me boost pressure as well. So the best guess I've got is driving the M90 twice crank RPM gives us a little over 5 pounds of boost at 5000rpm and numbers of 247hp 311lb-ft with the peak horsepower coming just over the 5000rpm rev limit the engine supposedly has.
I did take a few pictures of the powertrain sitting on the pallet.
Again I wish I'd have taken some with the valve cover off, maybe some day, there are other pictures available online though. That last picture you can sort of see how unusual the bell housing side of things is. Only two bell housing bolts are visible with there being 5 total that connect the bell housing and block, the other three being hidden.
There is looking down the side of the engine block at the bell housing where you can see there isn't a wide flange on the back of the block like you will generally find on the transmission side of basically every other engine.
This picture is the back of a Jeep 258 cubic inch inline six for comparison. That's what everyone generally thinks of as a Jeep inline six with the 4.0 liter engine being essentially the same, but you can clearly see the wide boss sticking out from the block.
Now for a bonus at the end of this pointless tech heavy post, try and figure out what this thing here actually is.