In march 2005 the engine development started. The initial plan was to have the engine done in 3 months...but it took years, many years to get it were we wanted it to be in performace.
The first mission was to find a V10 block that was straight and good enough for the project...I can promise you that all V10 blocks are not. The block received Darton sleves and landed at about 502Cui
Internals to the V10, nothing exotic, just standard American Super Stock parts :-)
The most challenging part of the engine build was the cylinder heads and the valvetrain. The heads alone took about 3 months of hard work to get them to flow at decent levels. To get there we had to go way offset on lifters and rockers, 3 different sets of custom made lifters/rockers were tested before we ended up with a functional set.
Next step was to design a plenum/intake that would work good with the two tiny Trottle houses that comes with a Generation 2 Viper. A long plenum, no dividers, no planes, only filled with injectors and fuel runners...the injectors were mounted in the center of the runner, inside the plenum.
This is how the plenum ended up looking. It works realy well above 4000rpm, but under 4000 it would have been impossible if we didnt have a fuel injected engine. To get the engine to work at low speed we had to remove 80% fuel at the rear cylinders and linear add fuel towards the front of engine (closer to trottle houses).
The guys who did the Dyno tuning in USA dind't bother to do that, so we spent two days in a chassie dyno to get the engine driveable...
