To revive this old thread, In the past, I have not done a lot of Alpine engine cam testing.
I have spent more time/effort with reliability. If an engine stays running,
you don't GET the chance to try other parts, at least by default.
However, I will tell the story of Steve Sage's SV street car, that I built the engine for.
My memory is weak but here is what I remember.
First off, of course, there was a limited learning curve involved, this was a FIRST street only Alpine I had done.
I had the cam reground just a bit more than stock, SV.
I followed Smokey Yunick's Power theory on cams, run the cam "straight up" , no advance, no retard.
The theory holds that IF you GAIN more of what you want by advancing or retarding the cam, you have the WRONG cam grind.
More about theory later...
So I put an offset cam key in to remove the built in advance in the cam timing.
Smoky would be PROUD, I thought....
The performance of the engine was NOT what I expected!
The engine would pull GREAT right up to about 4000 rpm!
At 4000 the power would STOP!
You could rev it higher but clearly you were adding NO more power!
Clearly, there was SOMETHING holding the POWER back beyond 4000 rpm.
It seemed all the world like the exhaust was JUST not flowing enough.
So I removed the muffler and tested it. It made NO difference.
At the time, nothing more was done to Sage's Alpine.
BUT there was the nagging lack of knowledge of what to do to get more power from the Alpine engine.
I talked to a head guy, he made it clear, the Alpine Exhaust port is NOT a performance port!!
It is the SINGLE literal bottle neck on performance of the Alpine engine !
It has TOO sharp of a bend coming off the valve seat.
So here we get back into theory.
WHY did removing the cam advance NOT give the upper rpms a bit of a boost, as you would expect,
with a typical engine?
With the Alpine, the sad fact is that the exhaust port makes it a NON-typical engine.
...at least from a performance point of view.
Everything you do to the Alpine engine has to take into consideration the weak link of performance.
It is the poor exhaust port!
So the problem with Smokey's theory, as far as the Alpine, to put it bluntly, it don't apply.
The Alpine NEEDS a big Band-aid to FIX the poor exhaust port.
So the first thing I started doing was grinding cams with more exhaust duration, a dual pattern cam.
There is a LOT of room out there to find the best Band-aid for the Alpine's weak link.
(I need to cut this short)
DW