I was thinking of going with a 400sbs and say 12psi boost. about 9.2:1 cr with inverse dome JE pistons. Was thinking of either intercooler or plumbing a fuel cell with methanol right into the fuel system with a Y block. Well to put it simply. What route you guys think I should take here. And is the 9.1 too high or should i run lower? Oh i'll be running fuel injection, trick flow heads, and all forged bottom end. Thanks.

 

I probably wouldn't go that high unless you plan on running race gas. Compression ratios that just sound too low if you are used to building N/A engines take some getting used to. You need to give some time to "reorient" your thinking around big boost. Given the many many factors that affect making power, compression ratio plays a relatively minor role. Staying out of detonation is FAR more important. Let's say you took compression down to 8:1 and lost 40HP, everything else the same. Horrible, right? Well, you're now a lot safer from detonation so you can just turn up the wick another 1 PSI and make that 40HP back, STILL being safter from detonation than a higher compression engine running slightly less boost.

I'm not saying that you should run 8:1, I'm jsut throwing that out as a fairly extreme comparison. Maybe 8;1 would work just peachy. Probably you'd want it a smidge higher- around 8.5:1 and still have a decent safety margin against detonation. Having not built a combo like that I could not advise you of the "correct" combination but I will say this- it's WAY WAY better to be a little low on compression than a little too high in a boosted application. They go "bang" in a hurry if you encounter detonation. Far faster and far more destructive than in a N/A application.