Yes, the "Star Wars" air cleaner forces me to use under hood air for my intake. I want some sort of originality, so cold air is not possible for cosmetic reasons. I am running a 4 core aluminum rad from alumitec. It is an original appearing radiator.
I believe, if you are building the heat you must disperse it, if when I instal the 455, in turn build more heat, because the configuration is identical to the 400, it will almost certainly be dispersed through the radiator if the engine is running cool. If it is not dispersed through the radiator, I would expect it would be dispersed through through block radiation and ?. Because the radiator air flows through the engine compartment, it could increase the under hood temperatures.
I must keep the engine cool to be happy, so if I am so foolish
as to instal headers, I believe I should try to keep heat in them. Then with all this "Ceramic" stuff, I started to think (woops, usually a mistake), that it might be a good idea to coat the combustion chambers and exhaust runners, maybe even the pistons to keep the heat in the exhaust where it might reduce the concern for cooling.
My horsepower aspirations are not too high. I am currently running a "stock" motor with about a 215 duration cam, and probably won't increase the cam to more than 220 with the 455. A set of heads with some port work, combustion chamber work and stage one valves, a little work on the intake manifold, balancing and attention to specs, is about it. I would love to change out the carb, but probably won't because of the air cleaner and hood clearance problems that will certainly result. So given that the motor was supposed to have 345 hp, when done, somewhere over 400 may be about what it will have, and probably not over 450, but that's guesswork. I probably won't go over 5500 rpm.
Thanks for your input!
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