My cousin is building a 454 for his '77 3/4 ton 4x4. It's a 4-speed truck with 4.11 gears and 33" tires. He has a '77 short block and a set of rebuilt 781 heads.

He'd like it to be somewhat of a hot rod, but it will tow a camper/boat as well. We're considering a relatively stock rebuild with a 262-268 duration cam, dual plane aluminum intake, and headers.

We're curious which pistons to use. We plan to deck it to zero and run a composition head gasket. With stock flat tops, this should yeild about 8.3:1. The dynamic compression ratio would be around 7.2:1.

If we run the 10.5 cc dome Speed Pro hypereutectics, we'd have around 9:1 compression. The dynamic compression ration would be around 7.7:1.

Would the 9:1 combo be too much for a truck/towing application?

Any other suggestions would be appreciated.

I recently built a 454 for a similar application a 1 ton dually tow truck. I used small dome off the shelf forged pistons for a final comp ratio of 8.8 to one. The key to this build was the cam shaft. Flat tappet hyd 260adv duration on 106 lobe cent. installed at 102. This was a custom ground cam from comp. The same cam on 110 lost almost 50 ft lbs at 2500 rpm. This thing pulls a 30 ft car trailer so much better than the stock eng did you would swear it had another 100 cubes.