Pre-Race Prep and a Troublesome Cam Gear

If you have been following us and our Ultimate Callout Challenge build, you have seen us put together a killer engine…and you’ve seen us break a lot of stuff. We broke a couple of camshafts, built a cover to support the camshaft, then broke a cam gear.

We broke the camshaft gear on Monday, and we needed to leave for UCC on Tuesday. Fortunately, we had a backup 5.9L Cummins Stormblock. We previously filled it with concrete and put in some top fuel type flange sleeves that should be pretty strong.

We started building the backup engine and found that the valves from our big Warhead will not fit a standard bore engine. So, we built a new “Baby Warhead” that the valves would fit in. This included building custom valves from some Chevy big block valves. We spent the whole day working to make these fit, and 24 hours later we have a head together and on the engine. And as luck would have it, it started…and sounded awful.

We pulled the head off the backup engine, we verified our compression ratio on the pistons and re-worked some of the valves in the baby warhead. We put everything back together, and it runs like a champ. So, with no time to test, dyno, or anything else, we load the truck and hit the road to Indiana, 24 hours later than scheduled.

UCC Day 1

We showed up to UCC halfway through the day one drag race event. We missed driver meetings, the event kickoff, and more. We pull up, unloaded the truck, and go straight to tech inspection and the race.

For the first pass, we set the engine on minimum fuel, gave it one hit on the track, and turned out a 10.91 sec pass at 122 mph. Will’s Junker Drag Truck has been faster than that. We were pretty happy with the results considering we didn’t even know if the engine would spool up and we were running on minimum power.

For the second pass, we bumped the fuel up to 650CCs. This time we got a 10.19 at 137 mph. Awesome. Just what we want to see happen when we turn up the fuel. So we bumped it up to 850CCs for pass number three. Something wasn’t right. We picked up about one mile per hour and about a tenth of a second. We should have been able to run mid-nine seconds.

On our final pass, we kicked it up to 1,000CCs to see what we can knock out. Off the line everything goes great. After about 300 feet the engine blows up and we have oil everywhere. It was so bad, they wouldn’t tow us back to the pit, we had to get on a flat bad and get driven back to keep from getting our oily mess on the track.

In the pit we found that the block was split down the middle. We’re done at UCC 2018.

Reviving the big engine

We brought the big engine to put in our booth so people could see the broken cam gear. We came up with the idea of putting the baby Warhead on the big engine. The bottom end was fine, the biggest problem we had was the fire rings. On the small motor the groove for the fire rings was in the block. On the big engine, the groove was split between the block and the head. Our concern was that it may not seal oil.

We spent all night taking parts from the broken engine and putting them on the less broken engine. The engine goes in about 10am on Saturday. We started it up, and it sounded pretty good. We had no oil leaks, could build up some boost, and we’re ready for the dyno. Luckily we drew a late dyno run and had some time make sure everything was as good as it could get.

Keep watch for part two of the Trials and Triumph of UCC to see how the new mismatched engine did on the dyno run. We will be posting part two shortly.

If you have questions on how we can help build your truck, leave a comment below, or reach out to us on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube. You can also text us at 435-962-9506. We’re always happy to help you figure out what is best for your truck.