Engine builders are interesting guys. They all have their own approach to things and many of them have their specialties that people know them for. Steve Morris is known as a guy who builds mongo-horsepower boosted engines for cars, trucks, Drag Week, land speed racing, and now…airboats. This video profiles a Dart block and head based 427ci LSx engine that was designed and built for a customer’s airboat. The truly interesting thing is the fact that the engine had to be tweaked from Morris’s normal package due to the fact that the owner said that he needed the thing all in by like 5,600 RPM. How come so low? The prop. They have the prop geared to be putting max load on the engine at that particular RPM. If you overspeed the prop bad stuff can happen so they will not run the engine harder than that. The owner wanted the dyno pulls to be concentrated from 3,000-5,600 RPM. Morris worked to make it as flat as Kansas. The results? Pretty stunning.
This monster makes torque like a freaking diesel locomotive. Four digit torque numbers for days on the dyno sheet and when one starts to think about the vehicle that this engine is gong into, that boat has got to be an e-ticket ride. Morris went with a Kenne-Bell blower and it produces very reasonable boost numbers and he modified the camshaft profile for this engine to target the power area that the buyer wanted. Judging by the results he talks about, we think that Morris succeeded in this quest to give the guy a reliable and awesome engine for his airboat.
Who’s the fastest man on the bayou? This guy. This guy by a country mile.
