Product Review #3 - ProPower budget 418 stroker kit

[DavidVizard-GFN]

Product Review #3

This is where we look at a promising product and give you a preliminary evaluation prior to any in depth evaluation we may subsequently do in our Product Spotlight Series.

Budget Ford 351 to 418 Stroker Kit by Pro Power
By
David Vizard

Regardless of which way you slice the cake real street performance is all about big torque numbers, especially in the lower rpm ranges. At the end of the day it’s all about how much air the engine can inhale per minute. This can be achieved with a small engine turning a lot of rpm or a big one turning proportionately less. Of course you can always add a blower to that smaller engine – or you can make the smaller engine bigger. If we look at adding a stroker crank to the program at the time of an engine build it proves to be a very cost effective way to get more torque. This of course does make the assumption that the increase in cubes is worthwhile.

What we have here from the Ford specialists at ProPower is a kit that will stretch a 351 Windsor all the way from the stock 351 inches to 418 inches – and do so without breaking the typical hot rodders bank. That’s a 19% increase in displacement. Used with the right parts combination and the results can be akin to a blower setup on a stock displacement engine.

Anytime the word budget comes into the picture with stress sensitive parts there also comes concern about that parts survivability potential. The ProPower crank is basically a cast steel and the alloy used has proven very capable over the years.

Granted any cast crank won’t take the abuse of a more expensive forged crank – it really is a case of knowing where to draw the line. In terms of reliability it is hard for us here at GFN to be concise as reliability testing can, in some instance take years. What can be said is that we have drag raced a previous iteration of this stroker kit that we built some 3 years ago. It has not had what you would call a lot of use but with 610 hp plus a 150 shot of nitrous it has not had what you would call an easy life either.

The particular kit shown here went into a 418 build (actually ours was a 425 because it was 60 over rather than the more common 30 over) that was done in conjunction with Mesa Balancing in Hialeah Florida. Working with Laz Mesa a 418/425 was put together using everything we knew about generating lbs-ft per cube and the results were, to say the least, pretty spectacular. As of now this engine is destined to be a full feature in Popular Hot Rodding so I can’t fill you in on too much detail. What I can say is that with a 10.5/1 CR this ProPower stroker kit was a major contributor to the 570 lbs-ft and 608 hp that was seen on the Mesa Balancing dyno.

David Vizard

[MAP]

Greetings David,

This engine is amazing! Last night while wandering about at WalMart, I picked up the current issues of PHR, and there it was, the full-length article by you about this motor...

I believe the article reported 564 ft-lb torque peak at about 5,000 rpm. Correct me if I'm wrong - but this is astounding from only 418in^3. I haven't plugged this into the EAP software, but my guess is that it would show over 110% VE at that rpm.

And, the article suggested that the heads weren't by any means exotic, but with competent hand-porting, peaked at about 300CFM near 0.60" of intake valve lift.

Can you share any more secrets at this point as to how you got such impressive numbers? And, is this level of performance inherent with any Ford-specific parts you used, or could the same be gotten with Chevrolet or what-have-you? (I know that's an emotional question for some, but I can't resist asking.)

Thank you!

Best,
Mark

[DavidVizard-GFN]

Dear MAP,

That's not the same engine. The one we just built uses a 60 over piston of significanly different design and the displacement was 425 inches not 418. Often a 4.1 stroker gets refered to as a 418 simply because that's the most common size.
The engine you read about in PHR was built over a year ago. The one using the new ProPower kit wsa built and tested about 5 weeks back. 570 plus lbs-ft was the number.

And the heads were a little more exotic but it was all subtle detail that got the results.

So we don't get other folk out there confusing this build with the last one I am going into the above article and make the point that ours was in fact a 425.

When the story comes out you will see that it's a feature on getting the right combo for a stroker motor rather than a story on a Ford build. This means the same rules apply to a SB chevy.

DV

[MAP]

Greetings David,

My apologies for presuming that one was the other. The apparent similarity between the two might suggest, however, that both engines derived from a progression of the same general thought process? Thank you.

Best,
Mark