Mild cam
Senior Member
Joined: Jul 2010
Posts: 8,544
Likes: 2,552
From: Alaska
Are you sticking with the non-PI heads? If so, changing the cam won't give you much by itself. You really need to go with the updated heads and intake to get the power you are looking for. Just the heads alone give you quite a bit of improvement and power.
Member
Joined: May 2012
Posts: 81
Likes: 4
From: Monroe, NC
Like akdoggie said if you still have the non-pi stuff you best upgrade with out sacrificing low end torque is to do the PI swap 99 and newer heads, cams, and intake. Only thing with doing the pi swap is on the 96-98 4.6s and 5.4s there is less dish in the pistons combine that with the PI heads smaller combustion chamber you compression ration is gonna be bumped to 10.5 to 1 forcing you to run 91+ octane. As for aftermarket cams in a n/a truck engine I personally would advise against it. Reason being of all the cam choices out there, there are tons, they were all designed more around the mustang. No one makes for a 4.6/5.4 what they use to refer to as an rv cam, which was designed to keep the torque low in the rpm ranger. Even the small cams like the comp xe262ah move peak torque higher in the rpm range. Not what you want in a truck IMOP. If I were to put a set of cams in one i'd go no bigger than the comp xe262ah I mentioned before.
Senior Member
Joined: Jul 2010
Posts: 8,544
Likes: 2,552
From: Alaska
You can bring down the compression a little bit, like .2 or so, by using the Victor type torque head gaskets. They are a mm thicker than the Felpro, lowering the ratio to just about 10 or just under. I read this in a performance article, and do remember using the Victors for our 302/351 head swap we did. It was the same on that conversion. I'll see if I can find the article and post it up. It was very informative and showed the pluses and minus of doing this swap. It was 99% positive.
