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Mid Michigan | I will never understand companies spending so much money to try to progress and end up going backwards. They had that beautiful 318 and 360 small block that was a very nice engine for a 1/2 and 3/4 ton pickup and they went to the Hemi. I think the hemi is a beautiful piece of engineering and the chargers and hellcats etc can attest to that. BUT: In the real world where you just need a pickup to go down the road and haul some loads in the back occasionally or every day the pushrod engines were just fine. I think the 360 is rated at 280 hp and Dodge could have pushed that to 400 hp in an afternoon with some good heads, intake, rods, crank etc. Just bulletproof what you have. If you want a "special edition" Dodge pickup put a supercharger and steel crank on the 400 hp 360 and have a 550 hp daily driver that you can work on. I just changed a number 8 farthest to the rear spark plug on my 360 Dodge 2500 pickup about 20 minutes ago and it took me less than 2 minutes. Ford did the same thing when they spent 1 billion dollars to start building 5.4 Triton motors. Yuck! They had the 351 Windsor at the top of it's game. 400 hp was a set of heads and exhaust system away and those motors are much more simple to work on than the 5.4. Could have developed the 460 into a torque monster with 480 hp and 550 ft lbs torque with a good set of heads. But no, they spent 1 billion to give us a gutless 5.4 with 265 hp and a 2 more cylinder to worry about V10 with 330 hp. WHY??? At least GM had the common sense to keep the pushrod engines to the end and develop the potential out of them. Progress is only progress if it makes our lives easier and better. They didn't do that with the Hemi or the Triton. And the sad thing is the only reason the gas mileage isn't still 11 on the new ones is because of the eight, nine, and ten speed transmissions with all the overdrives built into them. Dodge could have put a 10 speed behind a 400 hp 360 and it would have been a rocket that gets 16 mpg. Pretty much what the hemi does. And as long as we are comparing hemi's to pushrods. How many hemi's could beat a 440 6 pack Charger when they were both new? | |
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# 2 Dodge truck motor cam bad
