What About The Small Cam?
Looking at last month's story, we admit that we kind of dug the combination of TA Performance's little TA-212 cam and the Edelbrock B4B dual-plane intake. The cam specs are tame, with 218/230 degrees of duration at 0.050. The lobe-separation angle is 112 degrees, and valve lift is 0.459/0.470 inch. It made gobs of torque, but could it have been better with improved heads?
Yes. Way. We did an A/B com-parison of the stock heads versus the Edelbrock heads using the TA-212 cam and B4B intake. The Eddy heads made improvements worth talking about at every rpm point. The peaks improved by 22 lb-ft and 31 hp, giving us 535 lb-ft from 3,500 to 3,700 rpm and 457 hp at 5,300 rpm.
What's really interesting is that this combo destroyed every cam and intake setup we tested last month. With stock iron heads, the big TA-413 cam and large SPX single-plane lost 40 lb-ft and made just 2 more horsepower than the small cam and intake with the Edelbrock heads.
Next time you're sitting around wondering if you should go for the bigger cam or the better heads, we'd say nab the heads first. We'll always argue that the bigger cam should come next, but it was really hard not to like our supertame, stump-pulling 455.
Conclusions
Overall, we still think stock iron heads are decent with a small cam, and they can be money savers if you have good cores to work with. However, the Edelbrock and the TA Performance aluminum heads offer a significant performance improvement with any camshaft. Whether you choose the Edelbrock or the TA heads depends a lot on how much you care about stock appearance (which the TA heads offer) and what you intend to do with your cam and valvetrain. With a small cam and performance under 5,000 rpm, the heads are nearly equal. If you want more top-end performance, the TA heads are better, but at a higher price. The TA heads use stock-style rocker shafts that save money if you use stock parts but that cost more than the Edelbrocks if you want to step up to roller rockers.
Either way you go, there's nothing wrong with Buick power.
...
>>next page