I really appreciate your help. Here is some info I am not posting. I decided to do a little experiment and I think it bit me censored. My 406 was built for my circle track car by a shop with a good reputation. It was built very conservatively to run a 500 cfm 2 barrel with a very small restrictor plate and crap exhaust manifolds. Here's where I went stupid. I decided to go against the grain and try the biggest hydraulic flat tappet comp cams big mutha thumper cam. I knew it was going to run like crap but I had to try for some ridiculous reason.
I was out in my garage playing with it today and I got it to run the best I think it will run with my limited knowledge of tuning. After triple checking my valve adjustment, timing marks and tuning with a timing light and vacuum gauge. I managed to get it to idle decent on 22* of initial timing and make 11 inches of vacuum. I think with an adjustable vacuum advance that is more sensitive to low vacuum I could probably get it to run better. Since it doesn't make enough vacuum to even get my stock vac advance to work.
My plan as of now is to either buy a new set of lifters and reinstall my old cam or buy a new cam and lifter set that is better suited for what I want to do.
From what I am reading I haven't read anything good about my current thumper cam and I am calling the stupid experiment a complete failure. The old cam is an unknown with a lift of about .440 ish lift. No marks on the cam to identify it but it worked a lot better and made 22 inches of vacuum at idle and pulled good up to around 5500 rpm with tall gears.
Sorry for the long story but I felt like it was time to come clean since you are very knowledgeable and willing to offer good advice.
Thanks
I think you might not believe what I,m going to say here,
but I think easily 75% of the guys that get rather seriously involved in this hobby, make very similar and less than ideal choices, in the first few cams they select!
(I know I sure made some poor choices when I was in my late teens )
but I tend to learn from my mistakes, so I quickly learned that my mentors had REASONS for suggesting I not make several choices,
I rather quickly learned to have long and rather detailed discussions, and too ask detailed and pointed questions about WHY they were suggesting certain things,
and WHY they tended to AVOID use of some components,
and I eventually learned that probably 90% of the magazine articles I read were either designed to SELL some parts,
or they FAILED to mention the EXPENSIVE MACHINE WORK or OTHER MANDATORY PARTS required,
to get the part they were hawking and promoting for the guys buying advertising in the magazine.
post a list of the parts your currently using in the engine and drive train and gearing and any other factors you can think to include, And lets discuss your choices and whats likely to work and WHY!
