[ByronRACE]

I agree that most stroker engines are killed by tuning problems.

I completely disagree that big strokers "are no more problem than any other engine".

They are more of a problem than other engines, hence the reason they're often killed by tuning problems! When you're talking about large stroke; such as the case of the 800" stroker motors they're talking about; tuning one of these things on pump gas is often IMPOSSIBLE unless the engine was built low compression with the right heads, the right cam timing, etc. I've seen a LOT of really expensive stroker engines that won't take a reasonable amount of timing advance and blow all that potential power right out the tailpipe. A stock geometry engine built properly would run circles around some of these engines. Make sure you know what you're doing before you build something that ends up with a dwell/compression scenerio that simply doesn't work.

Generally speaking, if you stick with aluminum heads and under 4.7" stroke and under 9.5:1 in a 385 series, you'll be OK with premium pump gas. Substitute 11:1 compression and iron heads with big stroke on pump gas, and you're screwed!

514's, 545's, 572's, etc are known combos...they work fine most of the time unless you get crazy with compression. Your 572 is very detonation resistant probably because of those Blue Thunder heads; they are designed extremely well. You also probably didn't build the thing 11:1. These things must be considered more carefully when you are increasing stroke and dwell.

Be careful; it's easy to spend a lot of money the wrong direction and end up back where you started.

Byron