Built for Boost: The BPE 540ci
Richard Holdener and his team at Super Chevy decided to put our BluePrint Engines 540ci ProSeries Stroker Crate Engine to the test!
Our 540 was designed with boost in mind with a 4340 forged steel crank, forged H-beam rods, and matching forged aluminum pistons.
Holdener ensured that the short-block could make plenty of power and equipped the 540 with rectangular port aluminum heads and a stout solid roller cam.
In the first installment, they ran the 540 to the tune 649 horsepower. The first power-adder applied was a shot of nitrous using a Zex Perimeter Plate system. The final supercharged featured an intercooler, ProCharger F-1A-94 supercharger combined with a fuel injection. That combination netted a peak of 1,197 horsepower at 11.8 psi of boost.
They tried to see if they could get even more power out of our 540 by retaining the Edelbrock 454-R intake previously run with the ProCharger supercharger and then dealing with cooling.
“It is a law of physics that heat is an unfortunate byproduct of compression,” Holdener wrote.
To reduce unwanted heat buildup, they added an air-to-water intercooler and relied on dyno water to feed the intercooler. After dialing in the desired boost level with the Turbosmart manual boost controller, they reached a peak of 1,080 horsepower at 10.6 psi.
They cranked the boost up to 12.1 psi which brought an increase in peak power to 1,128 horsepower and nearly 1,100 lb-ft of torque.
Their final run saw 15.8 psi, where the twin-turbo BPE 540 thumped out 1,312 horsepower and 1,251 lb-ft of torque.
As Holdener and his team found out firsthand, our 540 is built for boost, can be made to exceed 1,000 horsepower, and comes with a 30-month/50,000-mile warranty.
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