If you’ve been following the Bosszilla build that our sister site, EngineLabs, is collaborating on with Late Model Engines, you know they’ve been itching to push the Ford Godzilla V8 to its absolute limit and see what this heavy-duty truck engine can really do in a performance setting. In its stock form, this 445-cubic-inch powerhouse makes an underrated 430 horsepower and 475 lb-ft of torque.
After realizing solid initial gains, hitting 660 horsepower and 650 lb-ft of torque with a cam swap, the next logical step was opening up the airflow on the path to unleashing even more power. That brings us to the exciting results from an LME CNC head upgrade, which focused heavily on fixing the factory bottlenecks.
The stock heads on this massive 7.3-liter engine feature massive 2.170-inch intake valves and 1.670-inch exhaust valves, which are fine for what the factor intended. That said, Late Model Engines proved they simply do not flow enough to suit EngineLabs’ high-performance goals. The intake ports actually have a sharp edge that kills airflow velocity and hurts power. To fix this effectively, LME used its five-axis CNC machines to completely reshape the ports and hand-blended the valve seats for a much smoother transition.
LME opted to keep the stock stainless-steel valves to keep costs down for the build, but decided to upgrade to PAC Racing dual-coil springs to handle the aggressive 0.640 and 0.641 lift from the Cam Motion street camshaft charged with orchestrating the valvetrain. When the engine first hit the dyno, the numbers were surprisingly low because the existing intake had reached its limit. Once LME bolted on a freer-breathing Brian Tooley Racing intake, the CNC head modifications finally woke up Project Bosszilla and did exactly what EngineLabs and LME hoped.
With that airflow restriction eliminated, this naturally aspirated beast roared all the way to 696 horsepower and 613 lb-ft of torque on pump gas. That is a solid gain of 26 horsepower and 6 pound-feet of peak torque over the stock heads, and it extended the powerband beyond 6,000 rpm. This shows that unlocking the top end is crucial for this platform. If your monster motor needs freer-flowing heads, LME can now turn these ported units around for customers in a week or two.
For more details on this Blue Oval engine project, you can follow the full build. However, our friends over at EngineLabs are not done yet, though. The next phase for the Project Bosszilla CNC head experiment involves testing these same components on a 460-cubic-inch stroker to see just how far they can push this monster.
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