adk-roadrunner
Well-Known Member
So I started my cam break in yesterday but it didn't go quite as planned. It's a 440 with sealed power 6 pack pistons, Edelbrock E street heads 75cc chambers , comp 284 nostalgia purple cam 484 lift and 1.6 PRW rockers. I'm using Edelbrock E street EFI that was previously running great on the 318 I had in the car but I obviously had to reset it and program in the new engine so we were starting over. I set the timing up by setting the balancer at 12° BTDC then made sure the rotor was point towards cylinder 1 and reluctor wheel point was at the pickup. I wasn't sure if I should use vacuum advance or not for break in but I hooked it up. I have a 195 thermostat and I also wasn't sure if I should run with or without it for break in. I searched these things but couldn't find straight answers on them as people seem to do both. The car fired up and ran and we immediately brought the rpms up to 2000. I had 50lbs of oil pressure so I kept going and I checked timing and I turned the rotor until it was around 30 degrees with advance hooked up. It was running but definitely seemed a bit rough and just didn't sound quite right almost like it had a miss or something. I tried adjusting the timing a bit to see if I could smooth it out but it only made a little difference. The car ended up getting warm really quick to about 200 degrees and puked a ton of water out so we shut it down. I was running it with an air bleed kit with the funnel that caps on to radiator so it can release air bubbles also I'm just running water at this point. I have 2 electric fans on a champion 3 core that are triggered by the EFI system and initially I had 1 set to come on at 170 and one at 185 but I later put them both at 160 after it got hot. I tried to run it 2 more times but it would get hot almost instantly and puke a ton of water out and we'd have to shut down. The last time the tablet read 214 after we shut it off and it wasn't running a minute. So in total it ran maybe 7 minutes and we did keep the rpm's up with 50lbs of oil pressure so I'm really hoping I didn't screw it up. If I remember correctly the EFI does run rough at first until it learns but I don't think that would cause the overheating. I decided to call it at that point so I could really check things and try again today maybe.