What do you think?

My concerns (stroker small block Chevy, 4.125" bore X 4.000" stroke with 5.850" rods) are mostly related to rod angularity and cylinder sideloading with this combo. And of course, ring seal, piston and cylinder wear over time (mostly street driven with minimal track time on a road course to sort things out from time to time).

Crazy idea, but if a 4.000" stroke in a standard deck height block is likely to cause reliability problems over time...... Rather than destroke...... What about a tall deck block and longer rods? No, not one of the big buck store bought 9.325" raised deck blocks. Something homebrewed and taller.

With my present 4" stroke crank and 1.170" comp. height pistons, but with a taller deck and longer rods......

7.5" rod = 1.875:1 rod/stroke ratio...... Need additional 1.65" deck height (10.675")
7.0" rod = 1.75:1 rod/stroke ratio...... Need additional 1.15" deck height (10.175")

If I scrounged up a set of identical blanchard ground 1-3/4" thick cast iron honing plates for SBC, machined the water passages into them, brazed them to the decks of my block with yellow brass rod and then bored out all 8 cylinders and cold sleeved it with taller sleeves down through the honing plates before milling the new, higher deck to allow the pistons to be at zero deck...... Would that destroy the rigidity of the block?

Instead of brazing the deck plates to the block, could the deck plates be installed permanently using dead soft copper head gaskets between the plates and original block deck surface along with long studs passing through them (for the heads) that thread into the original block?

In theory, it would allow me to run rods around 7.5" long and get a rod/stroke ratio of 1.875:1 . But with a taller deck block without a raised cam as well, would cam lobe to rod clearance be worsened over what it is now? Or clearance at the bottom of the bores?

I have found a source for 4340 H-beam rods 7" long (170 cu. in. MOPAR slant 6 application) which might be adapted with a little work. Custom rods 7.5" long and having the big end sized for a 2.1" 350 sized rod journal might be insanely expensive, though?

Yes I know...... Will need to make spacer plates for the intake, longer pushrods, deal with distributor length,etc. But is this homebrewed tall deck, long rod 427 Chevy small block idea feasible or worth doing?

I already have my block, crankshaft, 5.80" rods and pistons. Am waiting on pushrods until I have the engine together to measure and see what I need. So the pushrods are a wash pricewise, but would need spacer plates for the intake, longer rods and the machine work to install deck plates and sleeve the block to do this.

 

To be honest I have never seen deck plates used on a v-8, However in tractor pulling it is common in the bigger cube classes. you can take a 466ci Navistar(international) and get roughly 640 cubes. From guys I have talked to say they dont use a gasket between the 2 surfaces, Im not sure if they use an oring or some type of sealer, but some of them do run coolant in the head and block. In these setups they run a custom wet sleeve to get the longer cylinder. Keep in mind that these are all inline 6 cylinder engine. Any of the tractors in a pro stock and super stock class that run diesel will produce a minimum or 100psi boost. So they do hold up.

 

They are building 500ci LSx engine with deck plates.

http://www.chevyhiperformance.com/te...d/viewall.html