Frank,
I have no personal expeerience with World Products. They do a lot of advertising in a lot of the hot rod mags. Their engines and or parts are used in a lot of buildups which the mags cover regularly. They recently did a writeup in Engine Masters magazine(winter 2005) on an engine you(and others) may be interested. I was at a meeting all this week and during the breaks I read the article.
A little background here. Engine Masters for the last 4 years has put on a challenge to all comers to build engines of any make that meet very rigid set of guidlines. They have done it on small blocks one year, big blocks another. The main rules include things like displacement, induction systems, etc., etc. and must run on pump gas. Their rules are very tight and the competition is pretty fierce. Builders from all across the coountry go for this one. They look at AVERAGE HP and avg.TORQ numbers and add them together for the score rather than just peak #s. This is tricky in that to get an increase in average #s requires some real work. You may get increases in peak numbers, but it usually is at the sacrifice of the lower end. Thus giving you the same average as before.
Anyway, these buildup articles that they do may just be money changing hands. I don't know. What I do know is that this mag has a very solid reputation fron the way they have put on this challenge and I know the 2003 and 2004 winner John Kaase. John is one of those people who is in another world when it comes to cylinder heads. He builds a set under his own name and used to do a lot of the R&D for Ford. He also lives down the road from me.
What I am being so long winded about here is that if you are interested in a big block with big numbers, you may want to look at World's latest crate offerings. Some Windsor based engines. It comes in the 302 and 351 based layouts. Deck heights are 8.2, 8.7, 9.2 and 9.5. They cast their own blocks and beef them up in critical areas. The bare castings run $2400. The engines are built up in stages with the 427 cu. in. version reaching 500 H.P. with iron heads and 525 with aluminum heads at a price of $9795. The 460 cu. in. starts with the 9.5 deck 351, with 4.155 bore /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/shocked.gif and a 4.250 inch stroke. Here are the numbers on the engine.
The list on this one is $10,995. I have the complete article on these engines and would email to any that are interested. I would post them here but I think that is frowned upon.
The article, Wicked Windsor is in the Winter edition of Engine Masters mag on the news stands now if you want some great articles along with this story. some of their other articles in this edition include Power Multipliers, about rocker-arm ratios, and Separation of Power. An article about lobe seperation and does it really matter.
In the summer issue, they did an article about an engine built by Joe Sherman who won the first challenge series. It was titled The Shermanator 347. A 530hp Pump gas stroker you can build. It talks not only about the build but why he chose what he did and why. Great aarticle for those 347 fans out there. I can send that article to those interested.
Bill