Quote Originally Posted by IC2 View Post
Mike - you need a steel (best wearing), bronze or 'plastic' gear for the steel 'letter' camshaft. The cast iron gear will not survive. You also need the Ford Racing steel camshaft retainer instead of the OEM cast version and, preferably all ARP bolting. Then, of course, if a mech. fuel pump, you need a longer drive pin (I have 22 extras if you need one as they are unobtanium from Ford) and a one piece eccentric plus that ARP bolt. All this from my Book of Lessons Recently Learned
Thanks Dave! No sweat on the other "details" as the engine shop "should" / "better" have that covered. I was just looking on-line at distributors and it popped into my head that I may need to change the drive gear.

I had one of those "moments of vindication" yesterday.. I was second guessing myself in the decision to build a stroker since this motor was already all new. Well I went to the shop to check on progress yesterday and the machinest smiles at me and says "hey, ya gotta see this!" He shows me the conn.rods and 3 or 4 of them have a huge circular gouge in the bearing maybe 50 or 60 thous. deep! I looked at him and said what the _ _ _ _!... He shows me the crank and some of the journals have dents / burrs in them! We surmise that the kid that "overhauled" / assembled this motor had let the conn rod bolts ding up the journal and never cleaned up / polished those birdies! We also complained to each other as the shop that did the overbore laft a crappy finish and sadly the cylinders aren't straight! Not real terrible but, it should still be the same measurement top to bottom!

So when I left I felt REALLY GOOD that I made the right decision! Or maybe I got lucky for a change!