i built my engine when gas cost 75 cents a gallon,.............and i put an agressive cam in it. just tried to find the paperwork on it, i found it in my desk a few months ago,...........where it sat for ..............25 years or so,.........and i moved it to a "safer place",.....so now i cant find it,.........makes sense, right? anyway, i have a 289 engine, bored 30 over, with an aluminum intake, and 650 holly, and a 3 quarter cam, which means it is dumping gas in 3/4 of the time,........and exhaust is 1/4 of the time, roughly. i have a 4 speed tranny. i get 8 miles per gallon...........
unless you are racing it, and want performance,..........dont put in a hot cam. with gas at $3 a gallon,.........think about it before you do it. if you want to keep it a daily driver most of the time, i'd go economy. you arent driving the **** out of it that much.......although, i do have to admit,........i drive mine too hard sometimes.
that's my 2 cents worth. i've thought about swapping my hot cam out for an economy one, and tune down the carb a bit, or replace it with a smaller one. it would be very expensive to drive my car on a long trip for sure!

 

That's the nice thing about more modern roller cam grinds, you can get excellent performance and still retain adequate mileage. Especially with an o/d.

 

A set of Rhoads lifters will help low-end torque and efficiency. I installed a set with my Comp Cams 280H cam and I'm really happy with them. They're noisy as hell (think solid-lifter noisy), but I've got a lot more power from 1300-3k now than I did with my old XE268H cam, which had almost no power below 2k.

JMD, I run Engine Analyzer and Dragstrip Analyzer v3.0. Old programs, but I like them. They're still a little on the optimistic side, IMO, but the amount of info you caninput is impressive, as is the info it spits out.

 

I would try to go with a roller to avoid the break in process

 

JMD.. What engine sim program did you end up buying? Do you like it? I have deskyop gyno and have been wanting something more.

 

Desktop DynoI mean. Terrible typing!