Kasse – 900 Inches and still going for more cubes and better heads.
I got to meet Engine Masters winner John Kasse briefly when he was passing through Charlotte on his way from his Georgia based shop to some place up north. On the way through he stopped by to visit with DV. He was not quite what I expected. He may build thunderingly loud engines but John, I thought and subsequently established later, is a quiet unassuming man with deep dedication to his profession. When DV suggested we go visit John I was all for it. All this happened at short notice. The intended date of the visit also coincided with wild (and I mean wild) inventor/car nut/ avid GFN poster Matt Kneen (Big Block Fiero) arriving in town as well as Mervyn Bonnett, DV’s racer/crew chief buddy from Trinidad. Well I was not about to let them spoil a potentially exciting trip so we dragged them with us, kicking and screaming all the way to Kasse’s in the small town of Winder, Georgia!
For those of you who may be unaware John, seen above, is a two time Engine Masters winner and for 2007, by a narrow margin, placed second. His real area of expertise is the building of some of the biggest displacement racing V8’s on the face of the planet. On top of that they make plenty of hp and torque. Some numbers here may dazzle you.
How about 1800 hp and something over 1300 lbs-ft?
Since this section of GFN is technical in nature posing the question as to what equipment John uses to get these big race winning numbers is totally legit. It came as a little surprise to me that outside of an in- cylinder pressure measuring system and a wet flow bench there is little you would not find in a typical high performance engine machine shop.
The dyno John uses to test is also a little out of the ordinary to the extent they have modified it so that the engine drives through a 4 speed Lenco to simulate, as closely as possible, a car making a pass down the strip. When developing the engines the dyno is run mostly as a conventinal unit.
When the final tests are done the engine runs against the flywheel and the results are measured in time as per the drag strip. the shorter the time the quicker the car is. If you study the photo below you can see the stabilizing torque arm and, in the
room behind the dyno, just peaking out here, is the input shaft for the Lenco transmission setup. Behind that and just out of sight, is the flywheel for the inertia loading.
900 Inches.
So what’s the deal on this 900 inch motor I alluded to earlier? As you might imagine an engine that is even vaguely derived from a production big block is going to have a long stroke to get 900 inches (15 liters). If you thought so you’d be right. Take a look at the crank shown below.
What you are looking at is a crank that has over 6 inches of stroke! When turned up to maximum rpm the crank shortens up be nearly 0.050 inches!
So that the piston does not come screaming out of the top of the block the block has to be made taller by adding deck plates as shown above. This
takes care of accommodation for the long stroke and a rod long enough to produce a reasonable rod stroke ratio. The rod, shown below, is about
12 inches long thus giving a rod stroke ratio of 2/1 or so.
I’m feeding you all this info on the dimensions of the bottom end for one reason. That is to talk about piston speed. It a hot subject among tech orientated F1 enthusiasts (of which I am one). Since the F1 design community has such tight lips we have to make some assumptions as to the bore and stroke etc. A little research here indicates the bore/stroke ratio of a 2.4 liter V8 F1 engine would probably be in the region of 1.4 to 16/1 and the rod stroke ratio about 1.5 to 1.7/1. From these numbers the possible range of bores and strokes can be calculated. Forget the FIA imposed 19,000 rpm limit for the moment. Rumor has it that Cosworth had tested to over 20,000 rpm so lets use 20,000 as a figure to calculate an F1 engines piston speed. This works out to be somewhere between about 7100 and 7600 ft/sec tops. It is only when the bore/stroke ratio drops to 1.3 that the F1 engine passes the 8000 ft/sec barrier. At a 1.3/1 ratio the piston speed would be 8193 ft/sec. However the general consensus is that the F1 engines are at larger bore/stroke ratio’s than 1.3.
John Kasse big motor spins to an almost unbelievable 8000 rpm! That works out to be 8200 ft/sec – faster than our estimated F1 engine by quite a margin. Sure this 900 incher hardly has to survive more than a few minutes compared to a few hours for the F1 engine but the big motor is built within the constraints of a stock block configuration. I am intrigued to think what John might create if he were free to start a V8 design with a blank sheet of paper and something even remotely approaching an F1 budget!
I just had to put these two shots in here somewhere. It’s the three M’s. Me, Matt and Mervyn.
As grand as all these cubes may be they don’t really count for much if the heads don’t flow. As it happens the semi-hemi configuration of the heads for Johns big engines have valves a little bigger than their Chevy counterparts and they flow some big numbers. But John is totally convinced that there is more to the production of power than just inches and flow. John has a big inch Chrysler that has similar flow numbers for the heads but is 200 hp down on the big Fords. Why – good question and it’s possible answered by the wet flow bench. John set up one of his heads to show DV the wet flow characteristics of this head and it turns out that it was about the best DV had ever seen. Could the apparently great wet flow properties of the big Kasse Ford heads be the reason for the 200 hp difference?
The subject of heads brings me to one of the principle reasons we were at John’s shop in the first place. Namely cylinder heads. Two were of interest here. First the new P51 big block Ford head and secondly the possible re-introduction of the Kasse canted valve small block Ford head that Jegs sold until about mid 2007.
These Kasse heads feature canted and inclined valves. The valve location also allows for a 2.1 inch intake with the traditional 1.6 exhaust valve. This big intake valve is a contributory factor toward the fat flow curve deliverd by these heads.
A while back we ran a set of Kasse small block heads on the GFN bench in as-cast form and ported. They certainly flowed some big numbers. Unfortunately we only got to dyno test on one less-than-suitable engine. Even so the heads produced some very good numbers. As you can see from the nearby flow curves these canted valve heads had extremely good flow not only at high lift but also low and mid range.
In addition to being good in their as-cast form the Kasse heads ported up easy. Even a beginner sticking to just the most elementary porting techniques can make numbers as good as may CNC ported heads of strong repute.
It takes little in the way of experience or, for that matter, time to port the Kasse heads for even better results than seen as-cast. Figure at worst two weekends of porting to get the results we show below.
Neither the intake port nor the exhaust required much in the way of metal removable to get the results seen here. The midrange flow was almost as good as a cup car head of the 2000 era and well in front of all but the very best CNC ported parallel valve heads we have run across our bench. For what is essentially a totally streetable head 340 cfm at 0.600 is simply top notch.
At this point in time John is only seriously thinking of re-introducing these heads. Here at GFN we are all hoping he does just that. We already know that the price for what they deliver will be very competitive. Assuming that to be so then these heads will make our job of finding big horsepower numbers from small block Fords that much easier. If these heads ever make it back into production they could well end up with the GFN five star award for function. If they do make it don’t be surprised if GFN shows a lot of support for these heads.
Dusty Kennett