Video: Survival Motorsports Builds Blown Thousand-Horsepower FE

Barry Rabotnick and the team at Survival Motorsports in Michigan are well-known throughout the performance industry as one of the leaders in Ford FE-based powerplant development – they’ve worked with EngineLabs previously to discuss details on a few of their projects, and this time around they’re showcasing a blown FE displacing a cool 496 cubic inches that tops the dyno at nearly 1,100 horsepower in the process.

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The “side-oiler” is a revision of the FE block, which was originally cast as a top-oiler upon its debut in 1963. The top-oiler design fed the camshaft and valvetrain first and the crankshaft second, but by 1965, Ford had recast the block and added a hump on the side of the engine casting to allow the block to run a priority-main oiling system, where the oil goes to the crankshaft first and the valvetrain second.

This particular supercharged side-oiler is based around a block from Robert Pond Motorsports and was built for Survival customer Jake Kohl, who’s installing it into a sand drag truck, of all things. The Pond block is different from a traditional Ford block in that it’s been internally redesigned to feature siamesed cylinders for strength, a .750-inch-thick deck surface, and redesigned billet steel main caps.

Previously installed in the machine was a big-inch nitrous engine sucking down 400 horsepower worth of squeeze, and after breaking that engine, Kohl was on the phone to Survival to design a replacement.

Rabotnick explains, “This engine was intended to be a break-it-off effort with an FE, and to my knowledge this is the only blown alcohol FE in a competitive environment in the last twenty years or so. For Jake, the cool factor is what drove the development of this engine.”

Kohl needed the extra strength provided by the Pond block as he’s built this engine to withstand all the horsepower he can throw at it from the Blower Drive Service Air-Loc 10-71 supercharger, which was pullied on the dyno to produce only 14 pounds of boost – the reasons for which will become clear shortly.

Internals consist of a billet-steel crankshaft from SCAT that’s been designed with a big-block Chevrolet snout. Traditional FE crankshafts use a small, thin crankshaft snout, and as the blower was in the plan from the outset, the BBC snout was machined on during the crankshaft’s construction phases at SCAT. Also in the interest of building in as much strength as possible from the beginning, an octet of Callies Ultra I-Beam steel connecting rods and custom Diamond pistons ride the crankshaft on the roundy-round trip.

There was an inordinate amount of custom work that went into this build. Rabotnick tells us that his lead machinist, Willie Blair, can do amazing thing with metal. The distributor is a heavily modified unit that uses a big-block Chevrolet 'crab-cap' to allow at-track service of the distributor in the event of an internal issue, and this is the only FE engine in existence with this distributor. Also note the position of the blower drive pulley. The blower snout has been shortened up by a whopping four inches to pull the entire assembly closer to the engine and remove unwanted stress from the crankshaft.

There was an inordinate amount of custom work that went into this build. Rabotnick tells us that his lead machinist, Willie Blair, can do amazing things with a mill and lathe. The distributor is a heavily modified unit that uses a big-block Chevrolet ‘crab-cap’ to allow at-track service of the distributor in the event of an internal issue, and this is the only FE engine in existence with this distributor. Also note the position of the blower drive pulley. The blower snout has been shortened up by a whopping four inches, and the pulley has been turned backward, which pulls the entire assembly closer to the engine and removes unwanted stress from the crankshaft.

With the plan set to include an Enderle fuel pump and a single rack of mechanical injectors on top, the pistons were designed to make 12.0:1 compression in conjunction with the highly-modified Edelbrock Performer RPM cylinder heads.

Valvetrain components consist of a COMP Cams solid roller camshaft, with virtually-round dimensions of 292 degrees of intake duration and 296 degrees of exhaust duration at .050-inch lift, and lift figures of .777-inch on the intake side and .771-inch on the exhaust.

How much horsepower can the engine take?

“On those dyno runs we were only making 14 pounds of boost, and at that point my dyno was already overmatched,” says Rabotnick. “I don’t know where the limits are on something like this, but I think you could re-cog the blower and add a few hundred more horsepower with the blower. There’s more to be had from this combination, but without track data it’s hard to say. Our data acquisition on the sand is severely limited, also.”

Left - Blair's work is also seen in these two photos. That burst panel didn't exist - in stock form the intake manifold is solid in this position, and Blair modified it to make use of the burst panel, so that in the event of a backfire, the panel will blow out instead of tossing the blower. Right - The mount for the crank trigger is also custom - Blair designed it from scratch to hold the crank trigger along with an alternator mount.

blower fe dyno sheetThe Survival Motorsports dyno is a DTS4000, which is rated for 1,000 ft-lb of torque and 1,500 horsepower, and as you can see from the dyno sheet, this engine eclipsed the torque reading right from the outset, meaning that the tuning process on the dyno consisted of reading exhaust gas temperatures and careful inspection of the spark plugs.

As there aren’t really any other FE-based engines like this on the planet, Rabotnick consulted with other noted engine builders – like Mike Moran of Moran Motorsports – during the design process, and it was with their help that he feels the engine is a success.

“We tuned for good, clean, safe runs,” says Rabotnick.

Looking at the dyno sheet, we see that the engine makes 1,090 horsepower at a relatively-low 5,900 rpm, and 1,000 ft-lbs of torque from 4,000 all the way up to 5,600 rpm with an average of 1,004 ft-lbs and 822 horsepower across the powerband.

There’s nothing like a bit of blower whine – come getcha some!

About the author

Jason Reiss

Jason draws on over 15 years of experience in the automotive publishing industry, and collaborates with many of the industry's movers and shakers to create compelling technical articles and high-quality race coverage.
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