This is the second small-block Ford out of BK Race Engines we’ve brought you in as many months, but it’s fair to say they’re not much alike. Last month’s mill was about as cutting-edge as a carbied pushrod V8 can be, with modern, high-end parts, computer-controlled coil-near-plug ignition, and plenty of custom billet hardware. This Cleveland is decidedly old-school by comparison, but that doesn’t mean it ain’t stout.

First published in the October 2024 issue of Street Machine

“This engine goes with the overall theme of the car,” says BK’s Bill Kaglatzis, referring to his customer’s XY. “It’s like if a concours-restored Falcon GT had 15in Simmons wheels, Recaros and a tunnel ram put on it at the dealership back in the day. That’s the look the guy is going for.”

Bill initially pieced together the 393ci Clevo for the customer a while ago, employing a dual-plane manifold, single carb, and a much smaller, flat-tappet camshaft. Recently, though, the customer brought it back to the shop looking for more visual impact.

“It was one of our Phase III-style engines making around 550hp, but the customer got in touch and said he wanted to put a tunnel ram on it,” Bill says. “A tunnel ram just wouldn’t have worked with the wimpy camshaft it had in it, so we chucked a roller cam in it.”

Said cam is a custom-grind Bullet item, sporting around .650in lift and 252/258 degrees duration at 0.050in. The camshaft acts on BAM bushed roller lifters, Trend pushrods and Yella Terra Platinum shaft-mounted rockers, which are affixed to a set of Scott Cook 4V aluminium cylinder heads. As they’re designed to look identical to OEM cast-iron Cleveland heads while flowing significantly more air, they’re perfect for this engine.

The block is a factory Clevo item, while a 3.85in-stroke Scat 4340 crank, Scat H-beam rods and AutoTec pistons combine for a total of 393ci. Oiling duties are handled by an ASR pan and an off-the-shelf Melling pump.

It would have been easy enough to have a sheet-metal tunnel ram made to suit the combo, but that simply wasn’t the aesthetic the customer was looking for. Instead, an off-the-shelf Weiand cast-alloy ram got the nod, but it required some fettling to get it to work properly with the engine.

“Off the shelf, this manifold is designed for much larger ports than the street ports on the SCM heads we used, so to get it matched properly, we ended up having to put some material back into the manifold first,” Bill explains. “We took some port putty and formed it up in the intake runners, then port-matched it from there.”

A matching pair of APD 650 carbs sit up top, and while Bill concedes the engine would likely make just as much shove with a single carb, that wouldn’t give the period look the customer was chasing. “We went to a fair bit of trouble on the dyno to tune the engine to be sensible and well-mannered on the street,” he says.

Sensible and well-mannered it may be, but it also stomps out an impressive 665hp and 547lb-ft, and looks cool as hell in the process!

FINER POINTS

The OEM look was important on this mill, right down to concours-style details. “The ‘OK’ stamp on the rocker cover was a quality control thing, while the CK608AI decal on the other cover is how these engines were identified during vehicle production back in the day,” Bill explains. “At the rear of the passenger-side rocker cover, there’s another yellow marking (pictured above left). They had a sticker there from the factory that would always fall off and leave a yellow residue, so even that has been replicated here.”

BK Race Engines,
Bankstown, NSW
bkraceengines.com.au