Hey guys I know that the engine vs engine stuff has been done a lot. But I actually enjoy reading them no matter how old the post is. Some of the posts I started are still going! I know the 427 ford has a legacy for winning all different types of racing events in the 60's. (Le Mans, nascar) But how do the engines compare to each other? I am not trying to bash Chevy at all since I like them. Just looking for some info, and I know you guys are very knowledgeable! The 427 was a bored out 406 right? The Chevy 427 a 409? There were the side oilers Ford blocks and the non- side oiler ones right? Just love trucks/cars! Like the info from you guys!!

 

The first Chevy 427 was a special very limited production (50?) drag racing version of the 409 in 1963. The more familiar 427 came along in 1966, which was a major redesign of the original "W" big block 348-409. The 396 was introduced mid-year 1965. This was developed from the 1963 Daytona 500 "Mystery" motor, different than the first 427 mentioned above, but GM management soon pulled out of racing. There was a separate medium duty truck 427, and 366, with a taller deck and four ring pistons. BTW, most of these were "side oilers".

1958-1965 348/409/427 "W"
1965-1969 396/427 car and light truck "rat motor"
1965-1990? 366/427 medium truck "tall deck"

The 402/454/8.1L all came later and this thread is about 427's, so the story stops here.

I know little of the Ford FE history. These Chevy engines all started out as medium duty truck engines first, then adapted to passenger cars and finally light trucks. Someone please add the Ford story.

Jim

 

There were actually two 427s offered by Chevy in 1963. One was the Z11 Mark I or "W Motor," which was based on the 409. This engine was from a family that was very similar to the small block Chevy, except that it had a larger 4.84" bore spacing (vs. 4.4") and it also had a combustion chamber formed by mounting a "plank" head to the block at a 16* angle. This feature was similar to Ford's use of a plank head on the L/M 430, which was mounted at a 10* angle. Both the Ford and Chevy were introduced in 1958, and the Chevy was increased to 409 inches from 348 in 1961. Various increases in performance were introduced by Chevy until in 1963, the Z11 option was introduced.

To achieve this, Chevy increased the stroke to 3.65" (the bore remained at 3 5/16"). The heads had a raised port for a better shape, and the Chevy-like intake was split: the section with the water cross over included a tin pan that sealed the lifter valley, and the intake part was raised and separated from hot oil.

Also in 1963, Chevy introduced the Mark II "Mystery Motor," which was run at Daytona (NASCAR) by Smokey Yunick. This had the same bore and stroke as the Z11 427, but was very similar to the later Mark IV that we know as a "Big Block Chevy."

Chevy didn't really increase the bottom end of the Mark I "W Motor" over the small block design sufficiently to deal with the cubic inches, rpm, and power they were asking from the motor. The Mark II/Mark IV addressed this shortcoming and big block Chevies are largely as free from bottom end failures as any other motor is. One improvement, beside making the bottom end heavier and the crank larger, was to use Ford's system of the "side oiler," where the main oil gallery from the oil pump and filter runs along one side of the block and supplies the crank directly, rather than passing it around the cam journals from a main gallery located in the valley, like small block Chevies and the first FE Fords used. Ford had introduced side oiler blocks in the Lincoln and Y Blocks in 1952 and 1954, and then reintroduced them again for the 427 program. This was proven to be the most reliable way to oil a bottom end in 60s era engine design, and many other engines that didn't use a side oiler system often faced issues when the engine was adapted to high performance use.

The Ford 427 was an outgrowth of the FE. It was also introduced in 1963 as a bored version of the 406. Of course, it used the Y Block design of the FE, and also used the famous crossbolted center 3 mains that came out on the last 406s. The idea here was not (as some ignorant magazine writers supposed) to keep the crank from busting out of the main caps, but to keep the main caps from shifting around when 2 ton NASCAR racers dumped the throttle when entering turns, making the engine become a brake, and then jumped on the throttle when exiting. These stresses caused the main caps to shift in their seats, allowing the main bearings to loose their crush and spin.

In a Y Block design, one fixed this by using crossbolts, as in the 427 Ford and the 426 Hemi, and in non Y Block designs, one used 4 bolt mains, like big and little Chevys, Pontiacs, and so forth. The idea wasn't to make the main caps stronger, it was to anchor the caps so they didn't shift in their seats.

The added benefit to a Y Block design meant that the whole block was stiffened longitudinally as well, giving more stiffness to it.

While Chevy went with a combustion chamber that was similar to the old Mopar polysphere engines, by tipping the valves toward the ports, Ford continued to refine the inline wedge heads of the FE, which culminated in the Tunnel Port design of 1967. Ford improved these inline wedge heads until the famous medium rise heads used in the Le Mans effort, which flowed quite well. In the tunnel port head design, rather than running the intake ports between the "picket fence" of pushrods, Ford just sent huge oval ports straight to the valve and passed the pushrods of the intakes thru tubes which went thru the center of the ports. This was also an approach they tried on the early Trans Am 302 small blocks, but with less success. (Pontiac copied the tunnel port idea on their "Ram Air V" motor.) But in 68, Ford would deal with this by introducing a small block "Boss 302" with canted valves, and a version that was similar but scaled up that became the 429/460 series.

One difference here with the intake port arrangement should be noted. Ford tended to like evenly placed intake ports along the head, so that each cylinder's port to cylinder relationship remained the same. Chevy, however, preferred to pair intake ports. In the case of the Mark II and Mark IV big blocks, this meant that the curvature in one pair of ports in the head was different from the other. One pair of ports aimed its charge into the center of the cylinder, while the other pair directed their charges into the cylinder wall and didn't flow as well. So, a big block Chevy has two good flowing ports and two that aren't quite so good. The Ford plan of even spacing makes all the ports flow the same.

Another issue is the way the heads are held on. Ford learned some engineering tricks from making the flathead for 20 years and knew that attaching the head to the thin deck of the block wasn't such a hot idea. So when they brought out their overhead valve engines, they used 4 head bolts per cylinder and anchored these head bolt threads in the block so that they attached to the block and valley walls. Thus, the head bolts anchored all the way down to the main bearings -- from the top to the bottom of the engine.

On Chevies, they anchored the head bolts only to threaded holes in the thin deck, so they used 5. When the Mark 1 W Motors came out, they went to 6 bolts in a hex arrangement around each cylinder. But when they came out with the larger ports of the Mark II/Mark IV design, they had to leave two bolts out where the paired intakes passed thru the casting.

Chevy seemed to get away with this fairly well without gasket problems, but an engine which, in many ways was a scaled up copy of the small block chevy and which used 5 head bolts into the deck, the B/RB Chrysler, ended up with a little problem with doing this. That's why there are extra head bolts on the Hemi Mopar heads in the valley.

An offshoot of the FE head design was the SOHC 427 developed in 1965 for NASCAR. Bill France of NASCAR nixed the idea, and Ford dribbled them out to gleeful drag racers like Don Prudhomme and Connie Kalitta, who ran them quite successfully against Mopar Hemis in Top Fuel and Funny Car classes in the late 60s.

The problem with the FE was that it came with a 4 5/8 bore spacing, normally (in the detroit casting practice of the day) only sufficient for a 4 1/8" bore. Ford got around this by using stronger iron and using "square cylinders" in the 427, where the cylinders were thin between them and had thicker metal on the "corners," making them a bit square. However, where Mopar's big blocks had a 4.8" spacing and Chevy's had a 4.84" spacing (including Mk I, Mk II, and Mk IV engines -- with machine work, you can put a 427 or 454 crank into a 409), permitting 4.25 and even 4 5/16" bores, the best Ford could do with the narrower spacing was 4.23" and this permitted only a 0.030" overbore.

I left out a lot of opinion here; you can just take this for what it's worth to you.

 

Aww come on, lets read some opinion eh!?!

 

I wanted to add some words about 427 Ford oiling systems.

The FE used a system a bit like a small block chevy: There are three oil galleries running parallel to the cam, in the lifter valley. The center gallery was the main one. It got pressure from the oil filter thru a pair of passages, one of which intersected the passage between #1 main and #1 cam bearing. Then a second passage joined this one with the center gallery. Back between the #4 and $5 bearing webs, side passages connected to the two other parallel galleries. These oiled the lifter bores. Oil to the rocker shafts was taken from the cam bearings #s 2 and 4.

Oil to the mains passed around behind the cam journal bearings, #s 2 thru 5, and then to the mains. This is similar to the sbc.

Ford sometimes put a restriction in the main gallery passage between the side gallery cross passages and the #5 main tap, in order to keep enough pressure in the side galleries for hydraulic lifters. The issue here is that there is not a direct passage from the #5 cam bearing to the #5 main -- there's a set of three -- so this forms an additional restriction to the #5 main. So, a failure point under extreme conditions existed here for #8 rod bearing, which is oiled from #5 main, but not for the street.

In the 390 HP, Ford went to solid lifters, which didn't need side gallery oiling. They put a relief valve in the back of the main (now the only) gallery. This ensured that the pressure would remain high all the way to the back of the block.

The same 390 HP block was continued with a 4 1/8 bore for the 406. In the middle of 406 production, there was a switch to crossbolted mains. Then this crossbolted block, with a further bore increase to 4.23", was used for the first 427s. Sometime during the 1965 model year, Ford went back to the sideoiler system that was used on the original Y Block -- a gallery running down the driver's side of the block skirt that supplied oil directly from the filter to passages that intersected the main-cam journal supply passages. This is very similar to the Big Block Chevy oiling system.

However, no provision was made to oil the lifters, since only solids were used. In '68, a hydraulic cam was used in a detuned 427 street model, and these did have the lifter galleries drilled.

In addition, on the 427s with side oiling, a forged steel crankshaft was used. The hollow rod journal throws were all interconnected to the main oiling next to each rod throw, and both main and rod oil passages were provided at 180* This meant that, theoretically, oil could flow from any main bearing to any rod journal on the crank. Since Ford traditionally used cast cranks with large rod and main diameters, the use of a steel forged crank made for one heroically strong unit, especially coupled with use in a cross bolted high nodular iron block. This is what made the 427 bullet proof for Le Mans and Sebring, able to take on the finest racing machines in the world (likke Ferrari) and beat them at their own game.

But that was not all Ford did. With the steel forged crank and the cross bolted mains, Ford introduced the capscrew "Le Mans" connecting rod as well. These rods are positively the most beautiful and voluptuous rods used in any big V8. This bottom end was also used in the SOHC 427 that made 667 hp with 2x4 carburetion and 617 with 1x4 carburetion, stock.

Wonderful stuff, those better ideas from the Ford Family of Fine Cars.

 

You dont know crap Wild Bunch!!! just kidding!! Jesus! Thats why I posted this. I read a lot about Ford stuff. But the history is great! Thanks for the great post!!

 

Thanks, Jim, but it is easy to tell wonderful things about Fords.

 

A great engine the big block Chevrolet, particularly the rat (396/402/427/454/496 (8.1), 502) motor, although the W series (348/409) had it's moments.

 

Thanks wild.bunch that was some good reading for sure ! Just imagine being back in the day with these monster V-8's screaming,,breathing fire,,fuel and smoke,,,Aaaaarrrrrrrhh,,Aaaarrrrrrrhh,,Aaaarrrrhhh h,,as Tim Allen would say,!!

 

Excellent!! Thanks!!
I think the Ford FE and Big Block Chevy are the best looking engines ever built!!
I own a 427 BBC (well, most of the major parts) and a 396 factory installed in a 1967 Impala SS.
And I'm hoping one day to own a 62-64 Galaxie w/390/406/427, 4-speed, and factory cast iron headers!!

 

I've never owned or driven a 427 Ford-powered vehicle so I can't say much about them. But my wife has a '69 Corvette with the low-rated (390hp) 427 and I can tell you that it's a monster for a street car. Even with tall gears (3.36) and a four speed, it's brutal. Lots of torque and it screams on top as well. Very, very good motor.

 

When they both started putting the 427 on the track in the 1960s, the main objective was to beat the Ferrari; The Ferraris were dominating the race tracks with little anyone could do about it. Ford put out the 427 that beat the Ferrari, Chevy gave it hell and they produced an excellent engine but it wasn't enough to take the Ferrari.