Project F-Zilla, our farm truck-cum-earth-rotating burnout monster, is getting a heart transplant. The new organ is 764-horsepower worth of Late Model Engines Godzilla stroker.
We gotta tell you, F-Zilla is going to be one of the greatest Ford pickups on the planet when it’s done. It’ll have the look that preserves the patina it earned working on a California farm, but virtually everything else will be modern and insane.
Take the chassis. It’ll be a brand new Art Morrison Enterprises unit custom built to our specifications. It’ll have an indepedent rear suspension, so it’ll handle like no one alive in 1969 would have thought possible. It’ll have a modern TREMEC manual transmission with two overdrives. This will make for a demanded top speed and relaxed cruising on the highway.
Best of all, it will have the latest Ford pushrod powerplant under the hood. Ford’s 7.3-liter Godzilla V8 is the pushrod engine Blue Oval loyalists have wanted since the Windsor series of small-blocks disappeared. A Godzilla engine provides builders with a massive canvas straight out of the box, offering large displacement (445 cubic inches stock) and a cam-in-block design that is more compact that Ford’s dual overhead cam efforts. Recognizing the raw potential of this modern platform, Late Model Engines put together a tire-annihilating stroker engine that will be extremely streetable and reliable.
Careful Geometry And Big Displacement
We didn’t go crazy here. Though we expect F-Zilla to smoke its tires down to the cords, the basic architecture can make over 700 naturally aspirated horsepower without blinking an eye. LME increased the bore by a microscopic five-thousandths of an inch, preserving the thick cylinder walls for maximum structural strength. A Callies Magnum forged crankshaft featuring a 4.125-inch stroke provides the extra volume. This precise combination pumps the displacement up to 460 cubic inches while leaving plenty of room to grow even larger in the future.
Ford handed engine builders something unusual when they introduced its 7.3-liter pushrod V8: Lots of cubes, modern combustion efficiency, and it comes wrapped up in a package that actually makes sense for swaps. That alone makes it interesting, especially considering Ford’s history of introducing physically huge/wide engines that barely fit in the bay for which they are intended. The folks at LME will build the Godzilla engine up to 505 cubic inches, but that’s not what we were after here. We knew we could make lots of robust horsepower with moderate changes to the bore and stroke.
Forged Internals To Handle Abuse
The connecting rods are Callies Ultra H-beam units forged from Timken steel and secured with ARP2000 bolts. They are paired with custom JE forged pistons featuring a specific 1.212-inch compression height. Keeping the compression height incredibly tight allows the use of a longer connecting rod, which perfectly balances the rod ratio. The deliberate piston dish volume keeps the total compression right at 11:1 for highly reliable pump gas operation. This is not some 10,000 RPM engine with overhead cams or huge ports, nor is it for those who think the tachometer is an applause meter. It has usable power all over the rev range, and peak power was made at 7,100, but it made 675 horsepower at 5,500, which is incredibly useable.
Bosszilla Oil Pump Conundrum
The factory variable-speed oil pump operates via a rear jackshaft, which severely limits oil pan options for custom builders in an old-time chassis. Our ultra-modern, all new AME chassis will present no such challenges, but for other builds where that is a concern, Late Model Engines fabricates a custom front cover that deletes the jackshaft system entirely. This intelligent upgrade utilizes a front-driven oil pump with Coyote-style gears. It dramatically simplifies the entire package and gives fabricators the absolute freedom to run either front or rear sump configurations.
Staggering Dyno Results
Getting a massive engine to breathe properly at 7,000 rpm requires aggressive valvetrain upgrades. The team selected a hydraulic roller camshaft with 254/264 degrees of duration to shift the powerband dramatically. The factory cylinder heads currently limit maximum airflow, but light port work helped maximize the new cam profile. The final dyno pull proved the massive potential of this exact combination. The naturally aspirated engine produced 646.2 lb-ft of torque at 5,500 rpm and ripped to an astonishing 764.4 horsepower at 7,100.
Taking a factory workhorse block and reliably spinning it past 7,000 rpm proves the incredible versatility of this modern architecture. Ford enthusiasts seeking massive torque numbers now have a highly capable alternative to dual-overhead-cam powerplants.
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