I’ve been doing lots of dreaming about building my own engine lately. It is pretty easy to make 500 naturally aspirated horsepower with the LS series of engines; GM already did that combination for you in the corvettes and camaros. You can start upgrading from there, just depending on how much you want to spend. I’m reading up on how to choose parts and put it all together. The story of how this engine revitalized GM is one of my favorites. American ingenuity at its finest. Everyone else was focused on making complicated dual-overhead-cam multi-valve engines, and these guys created a simple, cost-effective, reliable, and compact pushrod powerplant to replace what was the most successful engine ever, the small block chevy V8. The engineering team did an outstanding job!
GM sells their LS3/L92 heads reasonably cheap to start with, and they are really good heads to start with. The aftermarket takes the stock heads and CNC ports them to make them even better. These flow numbers are hard to believe. Lots of ‘bang for the buck’ here. I’ll need a different intake to mate up to the non-cathedral intake ports of these heads. I was worried about the durability of the offset valvetrain, but I guess it works fine, GM is putting factory warranties on engines with these heads. Texas Speed and Performance and Scoggin Dickey are two of the big names in LS engine performance components. Both are in located in Lubbock.
