Fast Talk With Jeff Smith: The Kaase Magic Touch

Jon Kaase is a trip! I first met Jon many years ago when he was Dyno Don Nicholson’s crew chief. The two had won the 1977 NHRA Pro Stock Championship roughly two years before and I met Jon while he was testing their Pro Stocker at the now defunct Orange County International Raceway in Southern California.  We’ve been friends ever since. Most car guys know him as the man behind the Kaase (pronounced Kah-zee) Boss Nine cylinder heads that gave new life to the legend of the Boss 429.

He is also the man behind Jon Kaase Racing Engines, which is the culmination of his forty-plus years as an engine builder and drag racer. Kaase has become a bit of a legend of late not just for winning 12 straight IHRA Pro Stock World Championship titles with his drag race engines, but for also dropping a near headlock on Engine Masters championships – having accomplished that an unprecedented five times. Sometimes this kind of success can lead to inflated egos but Jon is the same, easy-going guy that I met nearly 40 years ago. If anything, he’s now more willing than ever to dive into something just because it is a challenge.

This last year’s Engine Masters (EM) competition is a monumental example. The EM decision makers decided at the beginning of 2015 to expand the number of classes and Jon chose the vintage class – if for no other reason than it looked like fun. The rules limited the engine to 1954 and earlier so Jon chose a Y-block Ford. Despite being a Ford, the choice seemed odd. His reason was iron-clad however. Kaase discovered that a hot rodder by the name of John Mummert, in El Cajon, California had made the momentous commitment to cast his own reproduction Y-block aluminum cylinder head. As he told me, “I can work with aluminum.” He knew that would make major head modifications far easier than working with iron. But his plan would intimidate most engine builders.

The Y-block is a bit of an odd engine because instead of the usual vertically-oriented intake ports, the Ford engineers turned the ports horizontal. Also different was the Y- block would be configured with the leading cylinder on the driver side. All other Ford engines position the passenger side cylinders forward. This seemingly insignificant point will become relevant once the full picture of Kaase’s plan becomes clear.  One reason why Kaase is so successful is because he can see things that the rest of us miss. He bought a used 292c.i. iron block and started from there.

With the aluminum heads, Kaase knew he could “reposition” the ports to his liking. His main competition in the Vintage class was his good friend Judson Massengill and the School of Automotive Machinists (SAM). The school had selected an old Mopar polyspherical 318c.i. A engine, but they were hampered by the limitation of working with the old factory iron heads.

Once the Y-block Mummert aluminum castings arrived, that’s when the chips began to fly. The first thing he did was mill out the horizontal ports and reconstruct new, vertically-oriented ports within the head’s existing external architecture. That’s like welding a ship’s new internal structure – in a bottle. Once the ports were configured from the bottom up, he then welded a complete new roof, including structure to mount the rockers and valvetrain. “I’ve got more money invested in aluminum welding rod than I have in the heads,” he told me.

Once he finished the ports, he then turned the heads over and welded up a majority of the combustion chambers and re-machined the chambers. In addition, he had to change the valve angle because he discovered the original angles were aimed to open the intake valve into the cylinder wall with lift. That’s exactly the opposite of what is best to increase airflow. So he had to move all the valve locations and angles to improve the flow.

Today, you’d attack that project with a CAD program but Jon did this mostly with pencil-drawn plans and a scheme that resided mainly in his head. “I’d work on it while driving to and from work. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night with a new way of doing something.” The finished product ended up with a port configuration that looked suspiciously like a small-block Chevy. Remember the cylinder block orientation we mentioned earlier? Kaase knew that this would pay off because now he could use an existing small-block Chevy tunnel ram intake manifold to complete the induction system.

But this was only perhaps a third of the picture. From the beginning he knew he was going to need a billet 4.00-inch stroke crank, so literally the first thing he did on this engine was order the crank. “I didn’t get the crank until a week before Engine Masters, so I didn’t have much time to test!” Because he knew it would take months for the crank to arrive, he fabricated a simulated crank for the front half of the engine so he could ensure the rods would clear the cam. This also required a custom COMP mechanical flat tappet camshaft with very small 0.900-inch base circle lobes to clear the rods.

What was even wilder was the Y-block uses a mushroom style lifter with a 0.500-inch stem and a 1.00-inch diameter foot that contacts the cam. This required a DLC (Diamond-Like Carbon) coating that exhibits both extreme surface hardness but also reduces friction. This was necessary because a steel-on-steel cam lobe and lifter would not have survived very long. The original Y-block lubricated the top end of the engine through the rocker stands, which were now long gone, so Kaase elected to redirect oil through the pushrods like modern engines.

This incredible amount of work all came to a head only a week or so after the crank arrived and he assembled the engine. With very little testing, he went to Engine Masters and the 400c.i. Y-block managed a killer 584 hp at 5,500 rpm with an even greater 596 lb.-ft. of torque at 4,600. The Edelbrock tunnel ram mounted a pair of 750 cfm Holley’s and the headers were a nondescript pair of 1 7/8 to 2.00-inch stepped headers from DynaTech.

While this is an overboard effort for 99.9 percent of the performance world, it illustrates just how creative it gets when faced with a liberal set of rules and the objective to win the class. Clearly, Jon Kaase is a winner.

 

About the author

Jeff Smith

Jeff Smith, a 35-year veteran of automotive journalism, comes to Power Automedia after serving as the senior technical editor at Car Craft magazine. An Iowa native, Smith served a variety of roles at Car Craft before moving to the senior editor role at Hot Rod and Chevy High Performance, and ultimately returning to Car Craft. An accomplished engine builder and technical expert, he will focus on the tech-heavy content that is the foundation of EngineLabs.
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