Hey look, it’s 3/04! This whole month is going to be filled with engine days and that’s the way we like it. Today we have some interesting stuff because frankly 304ci wasn’t the most common displacement used by many manufacturers out there through the course of history. There’s the 304ci AMC engine, the 304ci International Harvester engine, and the 304ci Holden V8 engine that was used in a bunch of cars in Australia.
Out of the three we’re thinking that the 304ci Holden is the only actual “performance” engine out of the bunch. The AMC 304 was not a performance option type motor unless you were talking about a Gremlin X or something so it was a pretty workaday V8 engine. The International Harvester engine was certainly not a performance motor but it was an anvil that would run for a billion miles while cranking out decent low end torque to move trucks down the road.
The Holden engine seems to have been offered in some performance models along with doing duty as a base type of engine was well. We’ll defer to our Aussie BangShift readers to straighten us out on that front. There are more than a few videos of 304 powered Holdens being dyno tuned and there are very few if any of 304 AMC or International vehicles of engines being run on the pump to make max power.
The 304 was a little work horse for all these companies and now it has its day in the sun on BangShift!
