The Eclectic Motorworks crew recently spent a few days with David Anton at APT in California doing some dyno research. We really believe in using dyno data to make parts and tuning decisions. We regularly dyno-test customer cars on a chassis dyno. Furthermore, we often take a few days in the winter to do some heavy-duty research on an engine dyno. Historically, we've done the engine dyno work at Baker Engineering (our local dyno shop), making hundreds of pulls over a couple of days using a mule engine or two. This year we thought we'd take the extra effort to ship our engines and parts cross-country so we could collaborate with David.

We sent two B-Series engines: one was a used, bone stock unit, while the other was one rebuilt and upgraded for street performance. Our goals were to test various parts on both of these motors to see which combinations gave us the best real-world performance numbers. You'll see more about these as APT and Eclectic Motorworks introduce some new parts to the market in the coming months. Carl will also be writing about what we learned in Classic Motorsports magazine.

In the end, we tested both motors with combinations of 5 carb setups on 7 intake manifolds, 4 exhaust setups, 5 ignition setups, 3 rocker arm configurations, different cam timing, cylinder heads, and more. We made 100+ pulls and came back with great data.

Day 1 began with the performance motor and various carburetor and intake maifold swaps. We tested several different SU and Weber combinations. We settled on the Weber DCOE with Maniflow intake for the remainder of our tests due to the simplicity of changing out jets to save precious time. Day 2 moved on to different distributor curves and ignitions, exhausts, rocker combinations and cam timing. We continued cam timing on Day 3 before switching to the stock motor and running some exhaust manifold/header tests and some more rocker tests.

Did we make our 125HP goal on the performance motor? How much effect does cam timing really have on your performance? Does your stock exhaust manifold stand up to performance headers? SU versus Weber? Stay tuned to Eclectic Motorworks and Classic Motorsports magazine for more about these tests and our results!

Many thanks to Dave, Lori and the rest of the APT family for having us, thanks to Jeff Schlemmer at Advanced Distributors for the quick turnaround on our distributor build-ups and thanks to Kelvin Dodd of Moss Motors whose understanding wife allowed him to break a date over the weekend so he could help us wrench!