4.3L V6 VS 4.3L V8-WHICH OTHER GUYS MAKES A BETTER BUILDER?

So which one would you rather have? A 4.3 liter V6 or a 4.3 liter V8? Time for some car guy talk. In this video we're going to compare the performance potential of a 4.3 liter V6 compared to a 4.3 liter V8. And the reason for the video is I recently purchased, I found in the wrecking yard during one of my adventures, an L99 4.3 liter V8. And it surprised me that a lot of guys don't even realize that GM built a not just one, not just the L99 4.3 liter V8, but actually a number of 4.3 liter V8s. Whenever we say 4.3 liter to the usual GM guy, he immediately thinks the 4.3 liter V6, you know, three quarters of the small box Chevy. But the reality is they built a lot of 4.3 liter V8s. That L99, also known as the baby LT1, is a small stroke, small bore version of the 350 LT1 that they use in the Camaro and Corvette. Now, oddly enough, this smaller LT1 version, this 4.3 liter V8, they put in the small baby LT1, they put in the giant size Caprice cars, and they used it in that Caprice. I don't know why they put the small motor in the big car, but in their infinite wisdom, that's what GM did. But the cool thing is, and what I'm going to do eventually with this combination, as I've talked about many, many times, we're going to take the stroke, the short stroke, crankshaft, and the long rod out of the 4.3 liter V8 and combine that with the piston in the 5.7 liter LT1. That way we can put that all in the LT1 block. That way we can create a DZ302, a short stroke, a D stroke, basically LT1 motor. But the other cool thing is we can take the crankshaft, the 3.48 stroke crankshaft, and the 5.7 rod in the LT1, combine that with the 4.3 liter piston, put it in the 4.3 liter block, and then we have a stroked version of the 4.3 that also turns out to be a very common displacement. It turns out to be a 305. So by mixing and matching these two things after we run all the dyno testing, we have a 305 and a 302, which will kind of be a cool test. But this brings us to the question, would you rather have a 4.3 liter V6, obviously with a 4.3 liter V8, smaller bore, more cylinders? Which one would you guys choose? Let's talk about it. To start off our discussion on the 4.3 liter V6 versus the 4.3 liter V8, we're going to take a look at the different versions of the 4.3 liter V6. Now, as I said in the intro to this, there were a number of different versions of that. And by different versions, I mean they all shared the same bore and stroke, but there are a number of different upgrades that they made to that 4.3 liter engine family, finishing off kind of with the balance shaft and vortex stuff. But what I want to talk about is basically the most powerful version, because that's what we're looking at, and that's where we're going to compare that to the stock version of the L99 4.3 liter V8. So this, unfortunately, I won't have dyno results on the 4.3 liter V8 yet, because I haven't gone down to Westec to pick that up and run it, but I will. But we'll be able to talk about that because GM actually rated the latest version of the 4.3 liter V6 before they made it into the DI version, which we're going to talk about also. That latest version of the 4.3 liter basically vortex balance shaft motor, compared to the 4.3 liter V8, that L99 and the Caprice, they were both rated at 200 horsepower and a comparable amount of torque, although we'll go over that as well. Now, on the 4.3 liter V6, as I said, they had a number of different versions of that. They range from, you know, 130 horsepower basically, all the way up to the 200 horsepower version, and that started off with early carbureted stuff and ended up with the multi-port fuel injection deal with good heads on it with the balance shaft, with 9.2 to 1 compression. So it turned out to be a fairly good combination. They used it in a lot of stuff. In fact, in the Mercury Marine applications, they have a version that was rated at 250 horsepower. So there's plenty of potential there, and I've run that combination. If you take a look at some of the videos to check it out, it's right here. There is a 4.3 liter V6 version that we ran, and that's what this dyno result is from, where we ran it basically stock. I put a camshaft in it. We also put a torque storm supercharger on it, and it ended up making quite a bit of power. Now, I didn't do any porting on the heads, and we need to talk about that because that's one of the big differences between the 4.3 liter V6 and the 4.3 liter V8. But as we can see on this curve here, the stock combination, this was a later balance shaft version of the 4.3 liter V6. It was run with stock exhaust manifolds, but it did have an electric water pump on it because basically this is three quarters of a small box Chevy, of a 350 inch small box Chevy. So all the 350 stuff bolted on there, which is why I was able to put the torque storm supercharger on. That kit was designed for a 5.7 liter small box Chevy, and it bolted right onto this V6 because they're basically the same thing. So this thing made 207 horsepower and 280 foot pounds or more of torque. I didn't run it all the way down low, which I could have, but this thing made peak power at 47 or 4,800 RPM. So it did very well, and this was probably not all the power that this combination could make. We ran this with an Edelbrock, and not that fuel injection, but with the Edelbrock intake manifold. So there's a little bit of a difference there. I also, we didn't have a lot of parts to choose when tuning that Edelbrock carburetor. We had a couple of sets of metering rods, which we tried. This thing was actually still running fairly fat. It was in the 11s. So maybe there's more tuning there, maybe more power could be had, but this shows that the 200 horsepower rating, at least for the 4.3 liter V6, is definitely accurate. So these were good combinations, and they can make good power. I also want to talk a little bit and just mention the fact that the most powerful version of this 4.3 liter V6 was obviously in the turbo, the Cyclone, and Typhoon versions. They were rated, although these NA ones were rated at 200 horsepower, those were rated at 280 horsepower and 360 foot pounds, obviously with boost. So that was kind of the ultimate version of those motors, although those turbo versions were earlier versions and not the balance shaft stuff, or at least not the Vortex stuff. So those are the 4.3 liter V6 stuff. Now we have a newer version of the LV3, which is a 4.3 liter direct injected, kind of an LT base 4.3 liter. So they still make the 4.3 liter V6, or at least a version of it. But that combination, it has a lot of cool stuff. It has variable valve timing, a variable oil pump. It does direct injection. It has higher compression. And those things are actually rated at 285 horsepower and 305 foot pounds of torque. So it's rated at a higher power output than even the turbo version of the previous generation, although it has a little bit less torque. But that power output rating goes up to 297 and 330 foot pounds if you run E85 in it, which obviously helps it make a little power. They probably adjust the timing curve and stuff to make more power. So there's plenty of power to be had from the 4.3 liter V6, obviously. But now let's take a look at some of the ratings and stuff on the 4.3 liter V8s, because there were more than one offered by GM. As I said, I don't have power numbers yet on the 4.3 liter L99 baby LT1 V8 yet, but I want to start out by telling you that and letting people know that GM actually made a number of different 4.3 liter sized V8s before they came out with this. It surprised me that how many people did not know about this. It is kind of a cool little V8, and it's probably not very popular. For one, they used the little V8 in the big Caprice, so they should have had a bigger motor in the Caprice in a big heavy car like that. But one thing it did do is it did get very good mileage. It had fairly decent performance, but obviously it would be much better with a 5.7 liter. But way before that, in fact, the first V8 that GM, not the first V8 that they offered, but the first small block originally came as a 265. That one was a 3.75 inch bore and a three inch stroke, so very similar to what we have here. It was designed in the mid-50s, and it replaced that blue flame six cylinder that they had in the Corvette. So it was obviously a good upgrade from the original six cylinder having the V8 in there. And it was rated at between 210 and 240 horsepower depending on how they outfitted it with a single four barrel, dual four barrel, the change in compression, change in camshaft. But remember, those were gross ratings back then, so those were more like what we would see here on an engine dyno than what you would see with all the accessories and stock exhaust and everything the way that they have the rating now. So it'd make much less power now than it did back in the day. But GM also offered an even smaller version of that V8 in the mid-70s, 75 and 76. It was a 262, and it was a 3.671 inch bore and a 310 stroke. So it was an odd combination, and it's not something that was very popular or that I haven't ever even seen anybody like hop one of these up. So if you guys have, let me know in the comments if you guys have ever done upgrades to these like, you know, put intake manifolds on or ported the heads or done anything or camshafts and stuff. These things were rated at a lackluster 110 horsepower. Remember, that's a net rating, so it's not quite as bad. Like it didn't make half the power output of that 265 in the early Corvettes, but it certainly was no powerhouse, and they eventually stepped up from that or got away from it. But they also offered, GM also offered a 267, which was a three and a half inch bore, 3.5 inch bore, and the standard kind of 348 inch stroke that we know and love in the 350 inch small block Chevys. So at least it had the right, you know, the common crankshaft in it, but it had a very, very small bore. That was the smallest bore, I think, of any of the small blocks that they ever produced. It was a very, very tiny bore. It was a 267. That thing, like the 262, was rated very low. It was only rated at 120 horsepower, and that thing was made in 1979, it shows, so way back when. But as you see, they made a number of other 4.3-ish. I mean, there's a little bit of difference in displacement, but similar size small block Chevys before they came across this combination. Now the 4.3 liter L99, as we've talked about, has a three inch stroke, so it's kind of like, which is why we can make a DZ302 out of it. So that's a fairly common stroke. At least it's something that they've used in the past. Obviously, they used it in the DZ302, and they also used it in the original 265. So it's a 3.743 inch stroke, or 3.75, however you want to call it, and a three inch stroke and a 3.743 inch bore. It has long rods in it because of the short stroke. It has 5.94 inch rods in it, so very close to a six inch rod. So maybe if I do an upgrade on this and we put forged pistons in, I'm going to look into changing the compression height on a piston or see if there's an existing compression height piston that we can use with a six inch rod if indeed do an aftermarket rod. I'm told that it has heads on it that have a 184.15 valve package, and if you guys know differently, or if it shares the head with the iron headed 5.7 liter LT1 base motor that they used in the Caprice and the Roadmaster and those other cars, let me know. But like the 4.3 liter V6, this thing was also rated at 200 horsepower. Now, actually the torque was down a little bit, 245 foot pounds compared to the 4.3 liter V6, which had in the NA combination had 260 foot pounds. But what I think, and something we're going to have to talk about a little bit is in the comparison between the V8 and the V6, is that I think that the big difference between the two is not so much that one has six cylinders and one has eight cylinders. I think the difference between the two, and especially like this torque rating, has more to do with the intake manifold on the L99. On the V8 application, it has basically the LT1 intake, which is a short runner intake. And the 4.3 liter V6, the 200 horsepower version, has a long runner, more an LS1 style intake manifold. So I think that that would make it produce a different torque curve than the V8 LT1 style intake manifold. So I think that that's probably what we're seeing. And once we get that L99 up on a dyno and we have a power curve to kind of compare these two, I think that that's what we'll see. But I think it will have less to do with the V8 V6 thing than it does with the individual components using that, more specifically that intake manifold. Because obviously, if we take a look at an L98 versus an LT1, there's a dramatic difference in the power curves. And the change in runner length between those has a decided effect on that. So now let's talk about which one you would choose and why I would pick one over the other. Pay no attention to this graph. It's actually from an LT1 testing. I did a 5.7 liter LT1 testing that I did way back when. But it shows the curve of what it's kind of going to look like. And I think that the smaller one is kind of going to look like this also. It's just going to be basically down everywhere. So I think this will be the basic shape. So it'll be interesting to see. But now if we can talk about which one we would pick between a 4.3 liter V6 and a 4.3 liter V8, here are basically the considerations for the comparison between those two. One, you need to look at available parts for them. So does the 4.3 liter V6 have available parts? It has camshafts. There are cams available for them. There's not a lot in terms of cylinder heads for them because their Brodex, I think, made a head way back. It's a little bit hard to find. There's no readily available like Edelbrock doesn't make a set of heads. Trickflow doesn't make a set of heads. Airflow Research doesn't make a set of heads. It would be nice if they did so you could put them on and upgrade those. There are fairly decent factory heads, especially the Vortex stuff. You can port those out and get some fairly decent numbers out of them. There's not a lot in the way of intake manifolds for them either. Edelbrock has a dual plane-ish manifold, which is the one that we used when we were doing the testing. But there's not your typical RPM air gap and Victor Jr. and tunnel ramps and high rises and all that stuff for the V6. So unfortunately, even though they did have a fairly good following back when they were doing the Bush Grand National stuff, those are kind of specialized deals. And it's not something that the average guy would put together. Like if you want to put together a 300 horsepower, 4.3 liter V6, you'd have to do it with camshaft and ported heads and kind of using this Edelbrock intake manifold. So unfortunately, there's not a lot of good things available for that. From a generic standpoint, a 4.3 liter V6, the thing that has going for it is that it has the big bore. So it has the potential to have more airflow. You have a cylinder head that you can use bigger valves in and having a bigger bore ultimately allows you to have more flow as an absolute level. Unfortunately, it doesn't have the aftermarket support to really take care of it. But let me know if you guys have done any V6 performance, any 4.3 liter V6 performance, particularly the cylinder heads, let me know what you think you can get out of these cylinder heads. How much can you get out of a set of stock ported iron heads from porting? And I'm not talking about a full CNC program, professional built dedicated deal where you do everything that you can out of that. I'm talking about more for the average guy. What kind of flow numbers can you get? What did they start with and where can they go? Because when we did this testing on the 4.3 liter V6, I did, we just put the heads back in stock. All we did was a valve job on them and stuff and put them back in. I don't think we did any porting on them. I know when Freiburger did one, he did some porting on that. I think Brulé even actually did the porting on it. And I'm sure he won't port another set of iron heads again in his lifetime. But so let me know if you guys have that. On the flip side to that, we had the 4.3 liter of this L99 LT1 based motor. And the reason that I would choose that is ultimately, I think we probably can make more power. Now on the downside of the small bore LT1 version, we have a limitation in head flow one because it is a small bore. So it is not going to, any cylinder is not going to flow as well on the small bore compared to the V6 application. The thing that's nice and the thing that a lot of people don't think about, and now obviously on that cylinder head, because it is a small block cylinder head, and even if it is a direct LT1 based cylinder head, the reverse flow, reverse coolant flow, there's still a lot of heads available for it. Whether or not they'll fit with the big valve size is something that I have to test, or we could put smaller valves in it to make some of those heads fit, including a stock LT1 head. I don't know if that's the case. I won't know until I test that. If you guys know, let me know. But here's what I want you to think about in the V6, V8 thing. One thing to think about is even though we have a bigger bore on the V6 and we have a cylinder head that could ultimately possibly flow more if we had a lot of heads available, what we have on the V8 application that the V6 doesn't have is we actually don't need the head to flow as much on the V8 to make the same power as it does on the V6. The reason for that is because we have more cylinders. So if we're trying to make 300 horsepower out of the V8, we're spreading that horsepower need over a greater number of cylinders. So each cylinder actually to make 300 horsepower, if we divide that by eight, each cylinder has to make less power than it does on a V6. So therefore the head can flow less on the V8 to supply that power need for that individual cylinder. So even if a head, even if a V8 LT1 or L99 head flows less per cylinder per runner than a really good touchstep set of V6 heads does, it doesn't have to just support the same power level. So that's the one benefit that I like over the LT1 stuff. I mean, I like over the V6 stuff. That's why I like the L99 because even if it does flow less, that's okay. It doesn't need to flow more to feed the needs of that cylinder because we have more cylinders. And same thing, if you extrapolate that out, that's one of the reasons that way back when that Ferrari did V12s, because if you have a limited amount of head flow, which you have when it's that small, if you have more cylinders, then you have, if we produce, you know, 40 horsepower per cylinder, and we have lots of cylinders and we have enough head flow to support that 40 horsepower, and we have more of those cylinders, then you end up making more power. So that's kind of why I like the V8 version. The other reason why I like the L99 is because it is a V8, it bolts in where all the V8 stuff, but it also has, there are more parts available for it. We have, even though it's an LT1 and it's not the same as all of the other small block Chevys, we have already a really good intake manifold. That factory LT1 intake manifold is way better than any of the V6 stuff. So it is a performance oriented manifold already. We know because we've made over 500 horsepower with that intake manifold. So if we could ever get the rest of that 4.3 liter combination to make 500 horsepower, which you can easily, if you just make it a 383 instead of a 4.3 liter, but the intake manifold will already support whatever power level you're going to get out of that. There are also lots and lots of camshafts available, obviously for an LT1, both from Comp, the guys at TPIS, Jim Hall, and those guys have done a ton of testing on these primarily for the 5.7 liter stuff. But if put a milder version of the camshaft, we should be able to make lots of power from the 4.3 liter. We can also obviously add boost to it. We can put ARP head studs and all that stuff that we can do with an LT1, because it's just a smaller version of that. The other thing, as we talked about already, the part swapping availability, we can turn the 4.3 liter into a 305. We can also turn the 5.7 into a 5 liter 302. So there's all kinds of coolness going on. And that's the other reason that I like it. The 4.3 liter V6 is a very common thing. If you mention 4.3 liter, that's what everybody thinks about. I also like the fact that I say, before I pop the hood, and I ultimately, I want to run these on the Project Nova at some time, but after we do all the testing, but I want to tell people I have a 4.3 liter in there, and immediately they're going to think of V6. And when I pop the hood, they're going to go, oh, you're sandbagging. I'm like, no, I'm not sandbagging. That's actually a 4.3 liter, except it's a 4.3 liter V8 and not a 4.3 liter V6. But let me know what you guys think. What do you think are the pluses and minuses of each one of these things? And which one ultimately would you choose? I'm not talking about extrapolating this out to Pro Stock or Formula One, or even NASCAR levels, or even Busch Grand National back when they use these. I'm talking about more for the average guy. If you're putting together a combination that you're going to do heads cam and intake, or you're going to run boost. And that's the other thing to think about, and I didn't mention that, and I just reminded myself, if we're going to run boost on either one of these, I think that the L99 will take more boost than the split crank in the 4.3 liter V6. But again, let me know what you guys think. If you guys have ever done that, I've only run kind of low boost, less than one atmosphere on the turbo 4.3 liter V6, and we ran less than that on the Torx Storm supercharger, and it did fairly well. And made lots of power. But let me know what you guys think. Which one can we ultimately make more power out of? Let's get to our conclusion. Okay guys, what do you think about our comparison between a 4.3 liter V6 and a 4.3 liter V8? Make sure to let me know in the comments which one you'd pick and why. Because there are lots of good choices. You have the same displacement, so ultimately you probably can make similar power out, but especially with mild modifications with a camshaft and an intake manifold and a ported head. But as we went over, there are a number of limitations for either one of them. I mean, basically, small bore has its limitations. The big bore has its limitations. But the 4.3 liter V6 doesn't have an awful lot of aftermarket support. Obviously the LT1 based motor does. But again, it has its own limitations. What I'm very excited about with this L99 4.3 liter V8 is I'm excited about taking the cylinder head off of that motor and finding out exactly what head it is. If you guys know, please let me know in the comments. But I haven't been able to find out information online as to exactly what that head is. Is it the same head as the one that they use, the iron one on the 5.7 liter? Does it have smaller valves in it? I think that it does. What are the flow rates of that 4.3 liter V8 head? Can we use a 5.7 liter aluminum head on the small bore V8 or will it hit the cylinder walls? Can I put a small valve in the aluminum head? Can we basically get more head flow to that 4.3 liter V8? That's what I want to find out. So that's what I planned on doing. We're going to do a ton of testing, obviously with the 4.3 liter. We're going to do cams and nitrous and turbos and all that stuff. It'll be really cool. And then we're going to do the mix and match of the displacements later on. But I got a lot of LT1 testing coming up. The guys from Jim over there, TPIS, is going to help me out. We got a lot of cool testing coming up. So stay tuned. So what would you choose? V6 or V8? I'm Richard Holder, guys. Make sure to like, share, subscribe, ring the bell, do all that stuff. More testing coming up.