This thread is coming maybe a year or two late but I'm going to document the build and the year of struggles with TNT's Charger. This all started shortly after My dad won the Supercar Championship. Tom approached us with an Idea to build a Factory Appearing Hemi to race in Supercar and hopefully It would be able to run with Ted and Greg. So we took delivery of His 1969 Charger 500 440 4spd car. It currently had a Hemi in it but a tame street motor not a power plant that could potentially run with the rat motors. So it was removed along with the 4 speed in favor of a Stronger Hemi and an automatic.
So this is where the fun or frustration really started what ever you want to call it. We made a call to Dave Dudek to get a recipe for a 600hp motor. So he promptly got back to us and advised us the build although we tool some of his advice we weren't looking for 840hp we wanted a much more modest 600-650. Modern cylinder head did the port work on the cast iron Hemi heads. I called our cam guy at Cam-Motions to get a discuss grinding a solid roller cam not a 50 mm but a stock cam core. The recipe also included a set of roller rockers from Ray Barton racing we opted for the spray bar options as we did'nt want to bush the lifter bores. As far as the bottom end goes we used an eagle crank and rods but had trouble finding the right pistons. We had a sample from Dave but they were quite exotic but we had no blocks that would fit a .030 overbore. So after sending the piston to a few manufacturers and being made promises to no avail. We finally opted for a set of CP Pistons that our friend Greg Hundt had got for us. We were on the home stretch we thought. Until the pistons arrived and almost knocked the head right off the block. Fortunately they were great to deal with and rushed us a proper made set to get around 13 to 1 compression.

I'm sorry about no pictures but I cannot figure out how to post them. I will work on that to get pictures up but most know about the car I'm talking about.
We finally had the motor together and got it on the engine run stand and made sure there were no leaks before it hit the dyno. It was finally dyno day and we loaded the motor up and brought it to Kiwi Engineering to get put on the DTS Dyno. Once it was all bolted up we did a few small pulls to check the air fuel ratios. Then we made a pull and it made just shy of 700hp. To say we were happy with the results was an understatement. Now we just had to thrash to get the car ready for the season opener at Atco. We had just finished tying up loose ends on Thursday evening and we were to be leaving Friday morning to make a test and tune session. We drove through the snow on Friday morning to be greeted with 60 degree temps in New Jersey. We got the Charger through tech and It was time for it first pass. It was uncontrollable the car could just spin the tires at any speed on the track. We were excited to see our hard work pay off. Well that quickly faded, two runs in we burnt a push rod. So we addressed that and got the car back together in time for the staging lanes to be closed. Saturday was a new day but held new problems for the Charger. Something was just off with the car it wasn't making the power it should so we pulled the plugs or what was left of them and we knew we were in trouble. Well the reluctor wheel grabbed the vacuum advanced and changed the distributor timing as it saw fit. We also had an issue with the car going lean through the traps but the fuel pressure was stable and the we had flowed the fuel system before we left. So we sent Tom on a mission to find a replacement distributor. We managed to get one for Sunday morning. We replaced the distributor and were up and running but the fuel gremlin was still getting the best of us so we called it a weekend and brought the car back to Auto Service to check it out. We started with a leak down test and found cylinder one to be leaking down 20% and the rest 5% so we pulled the left head and found a melted piston. Bingo we had found the problem or so we thought. At the same time we carefully inspected the carbs and found the needle and seat backing out causing the float level to be too low.
Which would explain the fuel starvation. We thought we were on to something finally. The next race a New England Dragway we fought traction problems all day but the car seemed to have it power back. Then we headed for a Test and Tune at LVD and put some drag radials on the car. It went 11.09 at 127mph and we were ecstatic. Then came the Summer break from racing we hit a few test and tunes and had some promising progress. We headed to LVD for the Dover reunion and tested on Friday. The Charger was running the best 60 foots it ever had but it was down a bunch of mph it had went 11.58 but it was mph around 120. So the we went to the next few races and were working on the tune but it seemed no matter what the horsepower was just not there. We brought it back to the shop for another leak down test and found cylinder 1 to be leaking 80%. What did we miss? It turned out to be a burnt exhaust valve. As of now we are getting the Charger back into fighting shape and hope to hit the ground running this year.

Add pic in File name- go to Choose file- find the picture in your PC or Smart Phone- add the file.

Some pictures of the engine being assembled.

more pictures
I have a full album of the car on Facebook along with Videos of The Dyno Pull
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set ... 181a027e3b

Ted your going to need a lot of popcorn because we won't know what happens next until April at Atco but hopefully you'll be seeing the Chargers tail lights.

i got the big bag from COSTCO

That's right every time your behind it in the staging lanes.

TNT

It's going to be an interesting year in SuperCars.

Oh yes, it is