First you should do yourself a favor, step back and figure out what you really want from your car and what you want it to drive like. Do you want a good daily driver or a car that feels like a purpose built strip car? Don’t get all caught up in dyno racing and peak HP if what you really want is a car that still idles below 1000 rpm and doesn’t surge, buck or stall in stop n go traffic. Sure you can throw a Trex in it, spray the shit out of it but IMO you won’t have a nice DD. And remember that no matter how fast you make it, eventually you will get used to it and it wont feel that ‘fast’ anymore and all your stuck with is a poorly thought out mod’d car that drives like shit because 90% of the time it is a DD.
Is your car going to be a DD?
Do you care if you have to change springs every 15K-20K miles?
Do you want a car that has peak power at 7000rpm and falls on it’s face under 4000 rpm or do you want a car that has good low end torque and peak power/shifts similar to stock or a slightly higher?
If you’re going to do it right then you really should plan to do heads and cam. And they really should be done at the same time because they should be matched to work well together. Yes AFR heads are top notch but those heads alone are over your budget…even used most of the time. For less than 3k you could get a nice set of Patriot LS6 style heads and a good cam package including LS2 timing chain, high flow oil pump, all the gaskets and seals etc. needed to do the install. Once you decide where you want the power curve and/or how much power you are expecting then I could help tell you what kind of valve events you are looking at (duration, lift, LSA, advance). Once that is decided we can look at your dynamic compression ratio (static compression ratio doesn’t really mean shit and dynamic CR is determined by the closing of the intake valves in degrees above bottom dead center) and then based off of that help choose a set of heads (chamber CCs) and gasket…etc. If this isn’t taken into consideration ahead of time then you could end up with a DCR to high and have detonation problems and if to low run into shit performance. These are just a few reasons that heads and cams ‘should’ be done at the same time or at the very least have a plan for future installation.
Once you decide what YOU actually want from the car and what the purpose is going to be (not what everyone else thinks you should want it to be) then some educated people here could much better guide you in the right direction. If you try to be more concerned with ‘area under the curve’ instead of ‘peak power’ that looks like Mount Everest on the dyno graph then I think you’re likely to be much happier in the long run.
So, before you toss that Trex in and end up hating your car because it’s a DD, what are you looking for? :beer2:
Ken