JKBully

F YEAH!!!!!! Now that's what I'm talking about!

chuck45

So stop talking and ante up the money! Hire folks with head and cam knowledge and see what they can come up with. I have no doubt that those techniques can cause this little motor to make more power but you'll still have the bottom end to contend with, along with marginal cylinder wall thickness so you can't bore it much if any. And most of those techniques create HP in the upper rpm ranges. The 3.8 just doesn't have the cubes to make it down low (without FI).

How about this. About 5 or 6 years ago I read an article in, as I recall Scientific American, about a guy who builds Allison engines for racing planes. I expected him to talk about all kinds of high tech stuff he did with cams, porting and whatever else. He did little or none of that. He said he just built it as strong as he could and poured the boost to it. When it broke you made that part stronger and put more boost to it. Maybe something relatively stock with a beefed up bottom end, rods, pistons etc combined with a SC or turbo would do the trick. I myself would prefer a blower that started working down low. If we could get power similar to a 5.7 while keeping the lighter 3.8 I'd go for it.

Maybe Ripp should pull an engine, go thru the bottom end beefing it up, and then see what their blower could do. Then maybe they could offer a HD parts kit that could stand a lot of boost. The problem is the 3.8 would have to be R&R'd ($), tore down and rebuilt with upgraded parts (more $$), reinstalled and (more $$$) then have the blower purchased and installed (even more $$$$). Given any blower or SC is 5k plus and figuring labor we're up in lower end Hemi territory again. I'm not sure it's possible to do anything for less than 10-12k that would be worthwhile.

JKBully

I may just have to pull it and figure out a way to put the SRT-4 motor in it!

nangulator

I am going to find a cheap salvage yard dodge caravan motor (3.8) to experiment on

Infidel616

I agree 100 percent. Even if the bottom end was built to take huge amounts of boost, lets not forget about the tranny, fuel pump, injectors, ignition system, etc. All of these systems are capable to handle a small amount of boost but when you start to crank up the PSI (BAR for the rest of the world) you will run into limitations at one point or another for every system. I do however believe that eight pounds of boost will not exceed the limitations of this bottom end and fuel system as long as proper fuel is used and it is driven with a bit of sense. I would be far more worried about the tranny especially for manual trans drivers.

CIJeep

That would be about 273 HP, now as to torque?

Are you talking normal aspiration? Street legal?

You might want to do a write up, do your own, before n after and become a sponsor here. Door would be wide open I'm sure.

I've got a few tools and if it goes down I'd probably take a long hard look at it.

CIJeep

Girdles are easy enough to make, I don't know how many mains this one has and never saw a pic. I know the engine was beefed up over earlier versions but then no matter how stout it may be someone always has a heavy foot and blames it on the engine.

nangulator

Yeah N/A, a mild stroke, some good con rods, much larger valves and some GOOD porting of the heads and intake manifolds. The cam lobe profiles actually are not that bad, unless you want to go high rpm and bigger injectors

JK-linux

MOPAR heads and a mild Frank's Racing Sidewinder cam on my 2008 Charger Hemi 5.7L cost me bout $2500 in parts and gained me about 80rwhp and and 80rwtq on a Dynojet (full exhaust, headers, Diablosport Predator and CAI already in place). It was well worth it IMHO. If I could get even 2/3rd's of that gain for the price on the JK I'd be all over it.

chuck45

So take a stock JK to the dyno and get a baseline. Then take it to the strip and get a good 1/4 mile time plus establish 0-60 and 40-60 times. Run a mpg loop. Then do your magic and then report on the results by duplicating the above tests. If the results are as you say buy some engines from totals and start going through them and then offer them as swap outs. I would think the maximum cost that could be justified is around the price of a RIPP blower which sees resistance at 5000. I drop 5k for 100hp and 100ft/# if there was no increase in wt, it was reliable, and it didn't kill the fuel mileage.