And for how long does that hold up? Tell the truth now....I have some experience with 7000+ rpm 440's.....
Well here is my experience with 2 of my own 440's back in the late 90s,
I never kept them for enough years to find out what eventually happened to them, but the one was a 69 steel crank engine, it was still standard bore, i bought it as a good runner, had the machine shop torque plate hone it .005, and it cleaned up 99.9% perfect, the hone just missed 2 small spots in 2 cylinders, it was good enough for me. The crankshaft was the same deal, it was just polished and kept standard size. I had the same machine shop fly cut the stock pistons, tapped the block for a 1/2" hemi pickup, drilled the main feeds bigger, they also resized the stock rods for me and fitted ARP bolts. I built it myself. Clevite main and rods. I was shifting it dead on at 7200rpm with a .590' solid in an A body. I remember i fitted crane golds, isky 3/8 pushrods, max effort hand ported 906's with milodon 2.14/1.81 valves, flowed 320cfm. Baffled sump, 2" headers, Team G, 830 annular from memory, or was it an 850, I cant even remember now but it was definitely an annular, either one. Mopar race distributor. Basically I copied one of the brackets in the engine book, but with a standard bore block, stock pistons, and crank journals. I sold the engine to a guy who put it in a rail dragster as is, and soon after i saw it doing 8.90 1/4's and i don't know where it went after that as i got out of the racing scene in that state afterwards.
that 440 above that i drove hard for 6 months then went on to do 8.9 1/4's in a rail car, was never line honed, never bored, and still used the standard main caps, and standard main bolts, and stock rods, stock pistons, stock crank just polished, stock head bolts, as it had come from Chrysler in 1969.
The other 440 i had was fairly much the same but not quite as radical, and cast crank. It came as it was in a car i bought, removed it and i found it had already been rebuilt and bored 0.030', flat tops, they looked like cast pistons, cheaper looking than the genuine Mopar pistons. It had stock rebuilt 452 heads on it, again i did all the bolt on mods, hand ported the heads myself (the 69 engine above the heads were done by a very good proffesional head porter), new valve springs, bigger cam, all the bolt on stuff, 2 1/8 custom headers (as i was planning on going more radical with the build afterwards) but never did. I was shifting that car exactly to 7200rpm also (for some reason both 440's i had would go the best to that rpm, and then just begin to flatten out, well the cast crank one felt a little less happy at that rpm somehow than the steel crank engine so i kept it at no higher than that, maybe the balance was a little off), now i think that engine 'probably' still had stock rod bolts, they didn't look like ARP's, i pulled one of the rod caps off, the bearings were like new, so i torqued it back on. And it still had the standard 3/8" oil pickup but i fitted a mopar windage tray and HV pump. I sold that engine also as a runner to a guy after doing a LOT of runs on the street with it, back then the streets were like a race track, so through all the way to top gear, countless times. and i have no idea where that engine went afterwards but he did install it in his car and i saw it driving not too long afterwards. So it too was still in one piece.
I think my experience sounds better than yours. And i would attempt it over again, and again. Sure one might break, but the attention to detail of putting it all together, especially on the first 69 motor, done right and making sure the oil pan was properly baffled and all the clearances loose, and it had a good windage tray and good oiling and the crank journals were standard but polished and nice and straight, and not running the rod bearing clearances so tight others would be literally asking me "how do you get your engines to not spin bearings".... i just wouldn't talk. Tell people you didn't machine a crank from 1969 that went on to do 8.9's (yes in a 2000lb car but still) and your bearing clearances are .005 ? i would just smile, internally.
Like i said if people don't get a 440, stick with a small block. Give me a good 69 motor from the factory that isn't too worn, and i'll do it over again. 550-600hp with stock pistons crank and rods. And yes they take a beating to 7200rpm. Would i go 7500 or more in a 440 like that, no.
Don't ask me what ive spun a stock short 383 to with only a solid cam. Nobody will even believe it. Stick with 6500rpm in your bb and have small blocks beat you is a good way of making guys with a small block happy with their decision that they're just as fast, and can get their spark plugs out easier
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And I should add I was one of the first people I know of that bought a new gm ls1 car very soon after they were just released, and stuck a 600" roller in it and spun it also to 7200rpm (don't ask me why I like that number, it just seems to work as the cam combinations have been similar) and did 120mph 'cam only' with a tune, 1 3/4 headers, blah blah. Then soon people caught up and began doing all sorts of crazy numbers with them, like a 9.8 1/4 n/a ls1 that had Darton sleeves in it. It did 9's on a good day when the sleeves weren't leaking. And given half his f-body was left back at home in the garage. And then for a while there i thought these ls1's are better than a Mopar BB. But then you realize they peak at a certain point and unless you shove 20+psi into it. And then if you do that to a 440 (megablock)........... you're at 1000+hp.
This is why you can take many a 2000+hp fueler crank and shove it in a 68 dodge. The B/RB is hard to beat. Some of the W8/P5 small block guys now sort of think they're beating big blocks.... a B1-TS or Predator head fixes that quick. There's no replacement for displacement, or cylinder head flow. Combine the two and you have a 1300hp Pro Stock big block. The P5 Nascar or W8/9 engine, it peaked back at low 800's hp and 9000rpm and just isn't big enough to ever be anything more. Try take the cylinder head flow any higher, the rpm's it will need to turn just can't be viable for anybody unless you own the federal reserve.
