Video: SAM Student Builds 700-horse LS3 – Updated With New Video

Updated 5/29/15 – Casey shared the video at the bottom of this post with us; the engine cranked out 1004.2 horsepower and 833 lb.-ft of torque on a 300-shot of giggle gas. Check it out!

sam1

Judson Massingil and the team down at the School of Automotive Machinists down in Houston do one thing, and they do it well – teach their ever-revolving group of students the finer points of building race engines. The school offers a number of different curriculum programs from engine block machining to CNC machining designed to provide the student wit the skills they’ll need to succeed in today’s diverse racing arenas all over the world.

One such student – Casey Martin – put together this bad-to-the-bone 408 cubic inch LS3 engine recently and hooked it up on the SAM dyno for some test pulls.

The engine is based around a 6.0-liter iron LS3 block that displaces 408 cubic inches in its current form. Putting his education to work, Martin performed CNC porting to the factory’s LS3 heads, and when combined with the rest of the rotating assembly the engine pumps out a healthy 12.8:1 compression ratio and runs on Sunoco’s 112 octane fuel.

The dyno sheet on the nitrous hit.

The dyno sheet on the nitrous hit.

Other notable additions to the engine assembly are a set of Comp Cams short travel lifters, an Edelbrock Super Victor intake manifold, and a Holley 4500-series 4bbl EFI throttle body. American Racing Headers 1 7/8-inch tubes get the exhaust out of the engine on the dyno. One of Holley’s HP engine control units was programmed to set the timing and fuel curves.

The engine will eventually huff nitrous oxide to boost the power numbers, but in these tests was run in a naturally-aspirated configuration. In this configuration, the engine pumped out a maximum of 704.2 horsepower at 7,100 rpm, and 555.6 pound-feet of torque at 5,600 rpm – a healthy number from a naturally-aspirated 408-cube bullet. The potential exists for this engine to exceed the four-digit number once the nitrous is hooked up – a stout showing for sure, and an example of the types of skills learned by SAM’s students on a daily basis.

300 shot of nitrous

Posted by Casey Martin on Friday, May 29, 2015

 

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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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