Ford Motors V8 supplement FE & FT 3 of 4

Ford built the FE 427 Cammer to solve one problem: Chrysler’s 426 Hemi was dominating NASCAR, and a conventional block wasn’t going to catch it. The side-oiler engine replaced a normal camshaft with an idler shaft and a six-foot timing chain driving twin overhead cams, hollow sodium-filled exhaust valves, and a hemispherical combustion chamber Ford couldn’t even call a Hemi because Chrysler owned the name. Sold as a crate engine in 1968, the dual-carb version made 657 horsepower for $2,350. Read on for how Ford’s FE family evolved from Mercury’s 410 to this NASCAR-killer.

By 1964, Ford had a NASCAR problem, and it wore an elephant hood emblem. Chrysler’s new 426 Hemi was humiliating the competition on superspeedways, and Ford’s answer wasn’t a bigger engine — it was a stranger one. Engineers took the familiar FE 427 block, shrank its footprint, and bolted a pair of camshafts directly on top of the cylinder heads instead of buried in the block where every other American V8 kept them. Ford wouldn’t even call the combustion chamber shape by its obvious name, because Chrysler had beaten them to that trademark too.

A Mercury Engine Built From Two Different Fords

Mercury’s lineup took a slightly different path through Ford’s FE engine family, running a 410-cubic-inch (6.7-liter) version exclusively from 1966 through 1967. Ford’s engineers built it by borrowing the 390’s 4.05-inch bore and pairing it with the 3.98-inch stroke and 10.5:1 compression ratio that also defined the 428, which itself entered production the same year. It’s a good illustration of how flexible the FE architecture really was — Ford’s engineers could mix and match bore and stroke combinations across the family to hit a displacement and compression target for a specific brand or model without designing an entirely new block.

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What Made the FE 427 a Track-Day Legend

The FE 427, introduced in 1963, became the top pick at race tracks almost immediately and stayed there for years, backed by a growing catalog of factory and aftermarket performance parts. It shared its 3.78-inch stroke with the 390, but stepped the bore up to 4.23 inches, and every 427 came with an internally balanced crankshaft. Solid lifters were standard across the board except for 1968, when Ford switched to factory-installed hydraulic lifters for that model year only. The iron block castings were made noticeably thicker through the cylinder walls and deck to handle the heat and pressure of serious performance use, a detail that separated the 427 from its more mild-mannered FE relatives.

Rounding Errors and Real Cubic Inches

Do the math on the FE 427’s actual bore and stroke and the number comes out closer to 425 cubic inches — Ford rounded up for the model name, a common enough practice but one that’s worth knowing if you’re trying to reconcile spec sheets. Early 427s built in 1963 used a top-oiler lubrication system that fed the top end of the engine first; by 1965, Ford introduced a side-oiler variant that reversed the priority, sending oil to the crankshaft first in a layout similar to the older Y-block engines. These blocks could be fitted with low-, medium-, or high-riser cylinder heads, and buyers could upgrade from the stock cast-iron intake manifold to an aluminum piece running a single or dual four-barrel setup.

Building an Engine to Beat the Hemi

Ford never officially published performance figures for the FE 427, but the engine easily made 400 horsepower or more even in relatively mild street tune, and tunnel-port heads with matching intake ports pushed output higher still by opening up the intake path instead of squeezing it between a pair of pushrods. The real target of all this development, though, was Chrysler’s 426 Hemi, which had turned NASCAR into a one-brand affair by the mid-1960s. Ford’s response, aimed squarely at dominating the 1964 season, was the FE 427 side-oiler Single Overhead Cam engine — an engine enthusiasts still just call the Cammer.

An Idler Shaft Doing a Camshaft’s Job

The Cammer’s block was smaller and lighter than the standard 427’s, with dimensions closer to the older 392 FE, and a deck height of 10.17 inches — more than half an inch shorter than Chrysler’s 392, with bore spacing tighter than the 426 Hemi’s as well. Rather than driving a conventional camshaft in the block, Ford used an idler shaft to run the distributor and oil pump the traditional way, while also turning a six-foot timing chain that powered the twin overhead camshafts mounted above each cylinder head. That long chain was notoriously tricky to set up correctly, especially once the engine was run hard at the top of its rev range, where timing precision mattered most.

Valves, Springs, and the Sodium Trick

The cast iron heads used hemispherical combustion chambers — the same basic layout Chrysler had already trademarked as Hemi, which is why Ford never used the word to describe its own engine. Valves were larger than anything fitted to Ford’s conventional wedge-head FE engines, and the exhaust valves were hollow, filled with sodium to help pull heat away from the combustion chamber and prevent burning under sustained high-rpm use. Dual valve springs and a valvetrain tuned for volumetric efficiency at high rpm rounded out a top end built explicitly for sustained racing abuse rather than street manners, backed by a transistorized ignition amplifier feeding a dual-point distributor to guarantee clean combustion at speed.

What the Cammer Actually Cost and Made

Every Cammer left the factory essentially hand-built, and Ford strongly recommended blueprinting any example headed for the race track before it turned a wheel in competition. With a single four-barrel carburetor, the FE 427 Cammer produced 616 horsepower at 7,000 rpm and 515 lb-ft of torque at 3,800 rpm; switch to dual four-barrels and those numbers climbed to 657 horsepower at 7,500 rpm and 575 lb-ft of torque. The dual-carb version weighed 680 pounds and, sold as a crate engine in 1968, carried a retail price of $2,350 — a steep sum at the time, but a small one for an engine engineered specifically to answer Chrysler’s biggest NASCAR threat.

The Cammer’s NASCAR Career Never Quite Happened

Despite all the engineering poured into it, NASCAR ultimately banned the 427 SOHC from stock car competition before it could dominate the way Ford intended, ruling the engine too far removed from anything sold to the public to qualify as a genuine production motor. Ford redirected the Cammer toward drag racing instead, where its rules were friendlier to purpose-built, low-volume engines, and the 427 SOHC went on to post serious numbers in Top Fuel and Funny Car competition throughout the late 1960s. That pivot from oval track to quarter mile is part of what keeps the Cammer’s reputation alive among engine collectors today — it’s remembered less as the engine that beat the Hemi on Sunday, and more as the engine too radical for NASCAR to allow in the first place.

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