Tweaking an 87 Olds 307 - opinions?

[jetsetw31]

There are NOT that many Oldsmobile guys out there compared to Chevy, not by a long shot. I had been immersed in Oldsmobile for so long, I had developed this impression that Oldsmobile had a decent following among the general car crowd. In fact, there are probably 100x more guys building Chevy engines than there are guys building Oldsmobile engines. That's not to say that us Olds guys aren't a dedicated and loyal bunch, we generally are, there just aren't that many of us. I'm surprised that there's ANYTHING out there for Oldsmobile, when there's such a huge Chevy market.

Sad but true. Being a Olds man myself I love when an Olds is picked over Chevy in a Olds vehicle.
T

 

[88ss408]

Well the first thing to do would be swap the heads to the 80-84 style.clean them up you can gasket match the ports a bit.
Find a nice eddy intake recurve the HEI get some headers and duals.
Also a nice cam can help.

 

[King_V]

I'm curious what TBI might be able to do to 'wake up' an old 307. I found an article where a guy adapted some TBI equipment off of a 78 seville I believe it was onto his 307 and made decent gains in torque. I can't seem to find the article anywhere. I'm surprised nobody else has tried adapting tbi onto a 307 on this board, not the roller rocker motors but perhaps the flat tappet would actually perform better being pushed by electronics. perhaps with a lot of tuning it could even support a small turbo - but thats probably getting carried away. The build im vaguely imagining right here is above my skill level - but I suspect all these parts could be assembled off of various make/model donor cars for just a few hundred dollars from a junkyard. The typhoon 4.3L used mitsubishi turbochargers for example.

On an email list I was on, a few years ago somebody did just that... I can't remember the details, but he had some prototype 2-bbl TBI intake that GM had made for the 307.

Not sure how he cobbled the ECU, etc., together, but as I recall it was working nicely for him. Sorry I don't have any details, my memory's REALLY dusty on it.

But, given that the carbed Olds 307 produced more torque than the carbed Chevy 305, I would imagine that the TBI 307 would proportionally produce more torque than the TBI 305, at a guess.

There are some results that come up with a Google search of Olds 307 TBI intake prototype, but it seems to require wading through message board threads, which I can't do at the moment.