It’s the age old question that hot rodders have asked themselves since the dawn of time. “Are they worth the money?” This goes for basically any part of parts that people have to spend money on to upgrade. There are some things that we know are worth the dough. A good camshaft, a great cylinder head, a nice upgraded intake manifold. But what about the stuff that we can’t really see or the stuff that just seems to be doing a job that stock parts do pretty well already? In this case we’re talking rocker arms and we’re talking about whether or not roller rockers make more power than the stock pieces when swapped in.
The engine used in this HorsepowerMonster.com (Horsepower Monster YouTube Channel) video is a hot rodded Jeep inline six that has been stroked, upgraded with a larger camshaft, and touched in basically all the other ways as well. Upgraded stock style head, intake manifold, four barrel carb, etc. We see the guys test a few different header designs on the engine to see what works best (with surprising and well explained results) before we go into the rocker arm test.
The test is very straight forward and it uses a pair of Harland-Sharp fully rollerized rocker arms for a set of pulls and then the stock rockers are swapped back onto the engine and run for a set of pulls. You will see full dyno data to see where the power is being made and a full explanation as to the results as well.
If you are ever wondering about the value of a product, especially roller rockers, watch this video. The results are not unique here, they can be applied to basically every pushrod style engine with regard to how the engine performs. What do you think?
I must admit I was surprised at the level of change in both torque and HP and when you think about a fully built V8 the difference will be incremental. I always run rollers because of the lift in my cams and the cams are always rollers to. I did not realize that these differences could be made with just the much better rockers, very interesting.
Failure is due to the neglect of fineness, and success begins with the importance of small things