Hopping Up An AMC 360 V-8 - The Hunt For Power: Part 1 - Four Wheeler Network
No one questions that the Pig Truck (Dec. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again, this thing oozes ’Merica, even out of the slightly leaky Dana 20 transfer case. And while the AMC 360 V-8 had plenty of grunt down low, we never really got to rev it to a point that it made any reasonable amount of horsepower. Also, late ’70s AMCs are not exactly well known for awe-inspiring ignition systems. Original equipment mechanical problems aside, Piggy had also spent the past 36 years and just over 90,000 miles receiving sporadic use and even more sporadic maintenance. Since we’ve owned the Jeep, we’ve repaired a few issues and drove the truck occasionally, but it’s not exactly our most reliable or efficient vehicle, so it hasn’t racked up the miles or been on the top of our priorities list for upgrades or repairs. Recently when Editor Pete Trasborg asked if we were down with doing a power-building article on the AMC 360, we had to say that we’d better run a compression check before trying to add any power. Having said that, with the stock ignition system, camshaft, air-pump system, intake, and stock valvetrain, we hoped that it would be fairly simple to get the AMC 360 to run much better than it currently did. Source: www.fourwheeler.com
