[BLSTIC]

Just after some discussion here, I have no real plans. But it occurred to me that some engines that used to be king have fallen by the wayside because of new engine designs. For example our own Holden (GM Australia) engines, in 308ci V8 and 202ci straight six were pretty much dropped the moment the LS1 came onto the scene, thanks to the superior block strength, head flow, and engine management of the latter.

But how much is left in old school designs, with the application of the modern bolt-on tech and some detail work that corrects the horrible build quality of the time?

The 'Holden 6' in its final incarnation was a 3.3 litre straight six with an indirect crossflow (bad) closed chambered (good) pushrod (bad) cylinder head with mechanically controlled electronic ignition (bad, even for the times), analogue EFI (better than carby, but super-bad by modern standards), single hole injectors (bad), and tubular headers (good). It was automatic only (3spd non-lockup), got 10km/l on the open road, developed 106kw and was supposedly capable of a 17-flat quarter mile, in 1985. The compression ratio was about 9:1

As you can see, there are *many* avenues for improvement.
I would expect that if the engine was rebuilt to proper tolerances (with minor head porting and flow balancing for the inlet manifold) it would pick up considerable power (I would expect 10-15%, because that's how damn horrible production was back then and piston-head clearance was hardly a thing people considered) along with a slightly smaller gain in efficiency.
The jump to modern, sequential EFI using injectors of, say, a 12 hole design for improved vaporisation would improve power slightly and efficiency a lot.
The ignition system could easily stay with a distributor (there's nothing technically wrong with it) but spark control would be under the computer control.
Because of the now equal cylinder-cylinder airflow, mixtures would be more even cylinder to cylinder, and ignition timing would be closer to correct for all cylinders, allowing a more aggressive tune to be used safely and improving efficiency further.
Because old-school autos suck, a conversion to a 5spd manual would also occur (there was no technical reason for the engine to be auto only, I and countless others have done it without consequence), improving everything except traffic manners.

How much improvement would you expect? What other things do you think would be useful to upgrade? Do you think a detailed old-school engine with modern bolt-ons could match a non-DI factory built engine of the same size for economy? Remember the Ford Ka still had a Kent motor in it...

Any discussion welcome