Thread: 355 sbc question about exhaust sound (need some help here!)

Tweet

Subjectively speaking, Tie, your engine sounds pretty good to me, nice gurgle and growl to it . It obviously has a relatively healthy cam in it, probably coming into it's power band in the RPM range of 2000 to 2500 and running out at somewhere around 7000 to 7200. With the headers being tuned to a specific range, when the engine gets into the power band, some will call this "getting up on the cam", it will tend to sound like it smooths out, thus the change in the sound of the exhaust note. Depending on the combination of components in it, it will sound different at different RPMs.

Here is a link to a Wikipedia writeup on early (First Generation) Chevy V8s; pretty good basic info.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevro...l-block_engine

From it, you can see that there have been a lot of iterations of the same basic engine design, from 1955 all the way to 1992. Because of this, one could build a 265 cubic inch engine from 1955 for example, with the right combination of parts, and it would sound and look just like the one in your car, and from an external point of view, only a person with a very intimate knowledge of the genre could likely tell the difference from the one you have. That 265 could be passed off to the uninitiated as just about anything. This is why you need to find out the "numbers". Read up on this, ask cogent questions, and if I were you, I'd not mess with that engine too much, unless you can definitively say there is something wrong with it.

One more thing: a few of us on this board have been messing with Chevy V8 engines since they came on the scene some 60 years ago, and have seen and done just about any and everything that can be done with them. We are getting somewhat long in the tooth - that means "old", at least in years, and often times, us "Old Guys" are somewhat short on patience with young folks; it's just the nature of the beast. Think of some of us as if we were your Grandfather; I'm 74, and have grandkids from twelve to almost twice your age. So if you get barked at and it bothers you, back up and take a look at what happened, and come at it a bit differently. We're not really old ogres, we just sometimes forget what it was like to be young and impetuous.

.