Lake Speed's Ford C3 NASCAR Engine: Time Capsule of 90s Technology! (Dyno & Full Teardown)

this is like a time capsule of what cup technology was you know 20 25 years ago you've got a purex car out here if you don't want to do something put put the motor in something it bolts right in there you can still drive a stock car huh oh you ever driven a stock car like recently uh what's recent so he's saying we get that engine freshened up put it back in that car yeah and get you back in the car we're at pro motor engines right now with that ford c3 in there that we pull out of lake speed seniors garage with lake junior who's the the marketing tech guru at total seal piston rings and we're gonna get a baseline on that engine to see what it does after it's been sitting for how long uh about 20 years okay long time and he used the vintage road race with that engine in one of his old cup cars didn't he yeah so the one you saw on the last video uh the 92 or 83 purex car that 92 thunderbird he hasn't been he vintage raced it actually saw one of those last races and you know like he was saying those guys had modern engines and all that he was way down horsepower compared to those guys with this old engine which is this is era you know probably early 90s spec type engine so early 90s cup type engine yeah early 90s cup type engine to what this thing really is so this is a ford c3 a c3 heads what does that mean for somebody this is like a windsor based block right yeah so this is essentially what a cup engine was a ford cup engine was in the early 90s of course that was a 92 thunderbird that he was racing so this was supposed to be the type of engine that would have been running in that car at that time because dad was trying to keep to the spirit and the intent of vintage racing uh which thing i heard in the other video those guys escalated it and there were cars that were four or five years old vintage racing is like that's not fair so interesting to see how this the engine actually does relative to what we know was at the time a 2003 2004 engine he was racing against well here's the part i'm really excited about so this is like a time capsule of what cup technology was you know 20 25 years ago you know i know that at my time at joe gibbs racing and the engine department doing the development of the oil program an o 43 piston ring for example was like state of the art in like 2002. today they run a 0.5 millimeter ring that's like half the thickness so explain that to people who don't understand what what exactly piston rings are you're talking about the thickness of the ring that goes like the groove in the piston yeah so every piston has a groove in it right because the piston is trying to hold the combustion energy and turn it into work that's what that makes engines make horsepower right yeah is from the fuel burning and making combustion right that's the cool part well the piston rings are the seal to keep all that combustion from going blowing by into the crankcase pad there's a blow by gauge back there on the wall so we're going to do is dyno the engine and see how much power it makes we also want to monitor all the other vitals of the engine was the blow by you know modern engines have crankcase vacuum it's a way of making the engine more efficient so what's going to be cool is to see what this engine actually does and then take it apart and find out what's inside we will learn okay why is it doing what it's doing then keeping the same heads and manifold and block modernize it and see how much power we can make it's supposed to make 730 right that's what it said as we said right of course it's running for a little bit so it may be down a little bit because as engines ran it was totally common back in the day for an engine to be down you know 10 15 horsepower at the end of a race so this thing's got like four or five races on it which those weren't as long as a cup race so i mean if it's down 50 that wouldn't be shocking so we'll see what she does okay and for for lingo's sake like i'm glad you explained what blow-by is because we're gonna be talking about that that's like the the combustion force blowing by the piston that's not it's energy not being transferred to the downward motion of the piston so it's making less horsepower right so i'm going to drop a fancy word on you so my job is i'm a tropologist so tribology is the study of friction wear and lubrication that's what i did for joe gibbs racing and we won lots of championships with tony stewart bobby labonte and kyle bush and all those guys so i do that same job at total seal so what we're trying to do is reduce the amount of blow-by reduce the amount of friction that way the engine is more efficient the power is made from the air going in the engine into fuel so that's what we call brake specific horsepower like how much power can the engine make if there was no friction no losses right that's the airflow in the camshaft guy that's all the smart guy like i've already talked to my buddy billy godbolt at comp cams like they're totally on board to get us new valve train for this thing and modernize this engine so that we get more air more fuel so we can make more power my job is to make sure as much of that power that we make in combustion gets to the crankshaft okay so you have your your maximum potential number and you are minimizing the spread between what it's like maximum volumetric efficiency is bingo versus what it's actually what actually gets to the tires okay you know going back to the morgan mcclure video you did right that's what those guys were trying to do you know with all that stuff they were doing in the manifold and all that they were trying to get as much air and fuel into that engine as possible and then that was the early days of plate racing and of course nascar came up with all these rules to take away all their tricks well once you ran out of tricks to get more air in the engine the only thing you could do for a plate motor to make it better was reduce friction and losses everywhere else in the engine and that's where you know 2003 2004 alkane worker joe gibbs racing and we went hardcore into tribology in order to make the engines more efficient which is when all of a sudden joe gibbs racing engines took off right it was not the only reason but it was one of the reasons for that team's success is that we really begin to look at friction and how do you minimize friction not just cram more air and more fuel into the engine okay that'll make sense this is pretty cool what's is this is the fun part is that rarely do you find a running engine like this that's that old that literally is a time capsule what did a cup engine look like in 1992 okay what can we do with it 30 years later and how much more power can we make so i've got crazy numbers in my head of what i think we can make up this this can be really fun to find out what she says today what we can do and what we find out when we pull it apart then the really cool part is going to be when we put it back together what does it really do then because that's where you're you got to put your money where your mouth is right yeah pme has been around for how i mean like they've been around since the 70s i think yeah yeah they started off in chicago and then came here as the nascar thing grew because peter gal that was the star the owner of a founder they were doing road race stuff right and then as that grew that they just kept on moving and growing and it came down here like i said the last couple years of my dad's career bme did the engine so this is a perfect marriage of everybody right here you had you know my dad's car his career these guys were doing the engines for him and now we're resurrecting one of these engines no they didn't build this and this is not a pme engine this is a engine that you know dad bought at an auction and had one of his other friends uh rebuild for him to do the the vintage racing uh but it's gonna be cool to see what we all can do to this engine and bring it up to current spec in terms of the internal technology and how much of a gain there really is by changing that technology you know what i just thought it's gonna be really cool is um if we are able to spice this thing up a lot and get it back in the car what your dad's reaction will be when he drives that car again and it's like oh my god yeah i wish this car did this 15 years ago i can't wait i can't wait he's been driving that twin engine car and he beats all these guys who come from all around the country young guys old guys they all show up they try to beat him on that twin engine cart and he still wears them out and so it's going to be cool to put him back how old is that car he's 74. he's 74 was going almost 94 miles an hour you know a month or so ago yeah and this one engine terrifies me on that open wheel go cart like just thinking of if anything went wrong like how much pain you'd be in like it's just crazy i'm telling you if you're watching the youtube videos out there of him racing he is still so smooth and so good he's such an experienced race for me like he said start off when he's 13 years old you know running around the parking lot at his house he just can see things and knows what's about to happen based on experience that you you can't teach that yeah and so i think um at his age he's in great shape he's continued to race and stay sharp there won't be any problem drop him in that race car okay so how do we get this thing fired up and see i mean they already got to bolt it up here made sure it runs so we didn't waste our time coming here and having it be blown up or something so right but we don't know what it's going to do no so yeah they've already got it warmed up and figured out okay hey yeah it runs it doesn't leak and all that and they're ready to go so we got all the fuel hooked up everything we've got manifold vacuum we've got everything hooked up here so they can do the full dyno work on it so at this point we just gotta go out there and let venice and the guys um dino the engine all right let's do it right now it's a pen holder did you make that excuse me you made that one no i just kept it because it's like nostalgic it really is not yeah we're gonna have to get a more detailed explanation on how these work this is like the thing that was inside that ernie urban intake manifold that larry mcclure was showing us except theirs looked like it had a lot of weird ridges and stuff in it but this one doesn't have but it's interesting now it's a pen holder you see the ring god that sound deadening is intense oh yeah oh yeah it is right are you going in there to check the timing it's so majestic with the air flowing in the wind like that i don't think it looks like [Music] did you add some timing to it yeah five degrees so is it 35 now yeah does that say 456 457 yeah that's an average between 6 000 and 8 000 this is the number it makes where this cursor is that's the peak number okay so it made 475.9 and like that it made 476 but more time and depending upon the motor sometimes they just don't respond it seems to be a little bit off from what your dad thought it was you know i remember him running this engine up at vir one time and the other guy behind me being able to get about eight car lengths lying on the straightaway i think i know why now it could be like a 312 if it was running in a trans am as it should be the publication does it sound like a smaller motor to you it's kind of hard to tell it doesn't act like a small motor because small motors usually have everything upstairs but it's got a pretty reasonable amount of work yeah it falls off really [Music] only after a thousand stuff do you think it's being like not making enough power because it's wounded from being erased without being refreshing five six times or sitting for 15 years exactly the sitting for a long time definitely hasn't helped it me i'm watching the blow by out there that i think that's probably the biggest telltale is that each of those things is uh one cfm right dennis it starts at the bottom at one and goes all the way up yeah that little like white white marker right yeah so make a sweep let him record it real quick and we'll talk through and show you what we're seeing here because right now it's bouncing around 2 cfm as soon as he loads it it's dropping up to almost 4 cfm now let's watch it over right here all right almost to five cfm i think that's a lot yeah just give you an idea a couple weeks ago we were at ron shaver's place doing some testing on some new rings for us one millimeter ring we saw two cfm of blow-by on a brand new engine just doing break-in work and that would go down once it's seeded and broke in right yeah like we've seen it as low as one cfm on a dry sump engine that's not even a wet song we can get it that's no crank ace vacuum none of that stuff just a one millimeter one millimeter two millimeter ring package and we're getting two two and a half cfm of blow by this thing is double that so how much a rule of thumb on something like this how much power is one cfm blow by costing you hard to really put a number to that but i can tell you this thing made what's almost 480 right there just about okay it's that little small black chevy that's a 383 makes 450. so this this this thing is only 30 horsepower over a small block with a 600 cfm carburetor and that's an 830 double bumper yeah so this is like a six liter with a cam in it at the wheels horsepower like this is like a stock ls engine with some mods horsepower than mine i keep thinking back to that racing vir when the other guy is just my dad's through the technical bit has got about six seven car lengths on him another guy catches him passes him on the straightaway every lap they're trading the lead because on the straightaway the guy can just drive by him like he's tied to a rope i think i know why now just sucking his windows out yeah straight away yeah wow yeah that's probably had something to do with it what's your theory dennis it's tired dennis is the man here he's just tired it looks tired yeah oh yeah the blow by gage says it's really tired we're going to find out he's got some moisture in the robot too so oh it's pumping water in there yeah a lot of moisture got a head gasket from somewhere more than likely unfortunately it is with this it just makes 480 horsepower well okay i guess that leaves us a lot of room for improvement it does so because like you know i was thinking all right 730 is what you said it was i figured it might be down 40 or 50. prices would be up high 600s and i'm thinking okay an impressive number to freshen it all up and come back would be man if we get 780 800 would be pretty impressive we got to work it out to jump from there to here but we'll see what we can do okay yeah exactly we have no we literally have no idea what's inside that thing i mean who knows maybe those cylinder heads he got from his friend have too much volume in the runners for the camshaft that's in it or it's not you know there's they could be mismatched parts we have no idea what's inside we're going to find out and that's the fun part okay and you get to come along for the ride i know we got this thing off the dyno you're gonna are you gonna uh spearhead the tear down oh yeah i'm gonna tear it apart all right my curiosity won't let me go home and just not know i gotta know i was really i was really hoping we were gonna do this today because like i don't want to wait another week and a half a major cliffhanger well especially now right because the question is as the guys noted based on that horsepower output is it actually 358 cubic inches yeah it may not be you know there were some small bores small cubic inch stuff that was being done in road racing at the time yeah so this is the blow-by gauge we were looking at while we were dynoing it and we thought it was about five but actually it was about seven so just a regular old small black chevy is gonna be somewhere around two two and a half this thing was up here about seven but that's still at 200 horsepower yeah that's you know you'd like to think every uh cfm is 50 that'd be nice but that's not the case so was this this c3 is that c for cleveland what is that what does that mean i don't know anything about any of this how is this how far straight is this from a 351 windsor is there anything in common with that the heads are similar to the old 351 cleveland as far as that's kind of where the head is very similar or it has similarities um the block is a windsor would be a windsor cam line okay but when these things came out in the late 80s early 90s when they started the main lines was a cleveland so the two and three quarter inch stroke or main journal and so that was basically it was a kind of a combination it had a windsor layout on the short block different deck height than the cleveland or a lot of them were some of them were the the deck height for cleveland was a 9 200 some of these are 9 200 some were 9 500 and then later on they became 9-inch okay but this one we're going to find out i'm guessing it's a 9 200. but um looking at the block and the freeze plugs this block would have been had to been after i'm going to think after 94 94 to 98 would be the year i would think this block was so is and this is an svo block is that what it's called so it's like cast by ford sold for their performance program to race teams that's right is that where these heads originated to that's what the heads are yep they they made a lot of these heads yeah robert yates did a lot of the early development on the cylinder head yeah um and then roush was involved with it you'll see a lot of the early manifolds like this one what does this one say on it does it have roush's name yeah it does i was looking for the egg earlier all had the roush thing on it yeah the early ones had jack roush on them and then uh and then later on they put svo on them i don't remember if that was on the early ones there's a wilson one it says yeah well wilson ported this manifold though so why was this plugged it's a great question that that's basically it was a breather it's it's plugged you could you could probably do something with them it covers that when you when you run this engine and if it's if it's sealed properly you want it plugged okay on the dyno it's just it's just to pour it on the dyno that you can put a fitting on so you can draw vacuum or if you wanted to do it in the car i don't think anybody did but you could there but basically for a dyno guy that would be on there you just have a port there you could access we accessed it over here today but because because back at that time we were starting to get better to where we made vacuum before that you know the up until the late 80s early 90s we all had breathers on them our ring ring seal required it once we got things to where they started working well the dry sump system started evacuating the combustion you started making less combustion in the bottom things got better the rings started doing a much better job so this is a c3 what's a d3 d3 is the next generation cylinder head okay from this and then that that that head lasted for i don't know the exact amount it was somewhere around a 10-year period eight year period and then the fr9 is the engine now okay so so the fr9 is completely different you know where you can look at the d3 would go on this block it's had a lot of similarities okay so the the progression was like it was c3 d3 fr9 yeah and before before the c3 i'm not sure if i'm correct but i think it was a b head it was a it was a candid valve before this they had a cannon valve in the late 80s because we had done some of those also that's fascinating because they all know anything about the ford lineage this is cool learning this stuff good stuff helps provide some context people watching this so they understand what they're looking at or like why it's significant or kind of tie the era to it better well a lot of people that are probably…