New to the forum with a Chevy Small Block

Hello from Louisiana! My name is Ethan and I'm 19 and am just starting out on the mechanic scene. I am enlisting in the Navy soon to work on the marine diesel engines aboard support craft and wanted to get some more hands on experience working on engines before going in. It all started when my great uncle Doug passed away. After the funeral, we had to start the process of clearing the estate and figure out what to do with the property. One day my mom came back from the house with chests and chests loaded with tools. Later that year, Doug's dad (my great grandfather) gave me his 1991 F-150. I started replacing parts on it as the worn parts started to break down and have even entered it into my first car show. However I wanted to get my hands dirty and do a full rebuild on a more simple and better engine. An old friend of my parents called up and said he had a Chevy 350 sitting around that he was about to scrap so the guy gave it to me. It was really better than Christmas for me and since then I've torn it down, repainted, honed, and am about to rebuild it. One day I hope to put it into a Camaro or some other classic body. (I am particularly fond of El Caminos as well.) I love older cars and really learning everything about how they were made and the differences that made them unique. To quote Adam Savage, "I always love the experience of walking through a path already trodden by engineers of the past. It gives me a view of the world through their eyes and that widens my understanding of the world". When I see a car I don't see metal or bolts, I see a story. Now to the nitty gritty details...

Engine casting number: 3970010 K10 04 TMM
1974 truck engine
4 bolt main
Cylinders bored out .030 over
Cast iron crankshaft
Pistons were flat top (except for one dish piston whish I replaced for a flat top)
took off the original Chevy orange and replaced it with Duplicolor DE1644 Racing Green "Hunter" paint and brass freeze plugs.

Cylinder heads (came with engine)
Refurbished 1969 small double hump heads
Casting number:3927186
63cc chamber and machined for bigger springs

Lunati 06103 camshaft (came with engine)
lobe separation 112 degrees
valve lift:.420 intake and .442 exhaust

Also included was a high-volume oil pump and Windage Tray
The oil pan was separate and turned out to have holes in it.


I found a guy on Craigslist selling parts from an engine that were almost a steal
because of how little he was asking for them. (the poor kid didn't even know what a carburetor was :LOL: )

Edelbrock 1405 600 cfm carburetor - 50$ (spent 40$ on a rebuild kit and needs new accelerator pump and some cleaning)

Edelbrock dual plane Performer intake manifold - 50$

Edelbrock air cleaner - 10$

Alternator - 10$ (come on it was 10 bucks I couldn't resist :D )

Note: the engine came only with the cam, crank, pistons and tray installed. So what I need to order is a kit containing all the bolts I'll need for assembly.

This is all that I have so far and I still have a long way to go before I'll hear this beauty roar to life. I need a distributor, headers, brackets, water pump and all that other fun stuff.

I welcome all comments and suggestions from you guys who are more experienced at this than I am. All advice will be much appreciated. Any ballpark idea of horsepower and torque I might expect?

Welcome from another Louisiana hot rodder!

Good story about your engine, but I need to add something. If the cam is a flat tappet cam and has been used, it would not be a good idea to reuse it. It will probably fail very quickly, even with new lifters. Now, if that's a roller cam, you're probably ok.

Good luck on the project and the upcoming stint in the Navy.

Welcome to Club hot rod and good on you for enlisting. Do your heads have accessory bolt holes? That is one bad thing about older double humps is they don't have them. It can make hanging accessories a bit more of a challenge.

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Go to a junk yard, I'll bet you can tear down a motor for the bolts for little or nothing.

First I would like to say thank you! Second I was wondering what you meant about re-using the cam. When I took my engine to the machine shop the guy grabbed it and offered to polish it up for me. What should I be looking for as far as damage or signs that it's no good to use?

Thank you for that I definitely look forward to serving this great country. And yes I'm fortunate enough to have gotten heads with the accessory bolt holes in them.

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Originally Posted by Hotrod46

Welcome from another Louisiana hot rodder!

Good story about your engine, but I need to add something. If the cam is a flat tappet cam and has been used, it would not be a good idea to reuse it. It will probably fail very quickly, even with new lifters. Now, if that's a roller cam, you're probably ok.

Good luck on the project and the upcoming stint in the Navy.

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First I would like to say thank you! Second I was wondering what you meant about re-using the cam. When I took my engine to the machine shop the guy grabbed it and offered to polish it up for me. What should I be looking for as far as damage or signs that it's no good to use?

Flat tappet cams mate to the lifters after a very short period. If you reuse the lifters that were in the engine and keep them on the same lobe they came from, then you could get by with reusing it. .This means marking where they came from at disassembly of the engine. If you didn't do that, thnn trash that cam and get a new one. Rebuilding an engine costs too much in time and money to chance it.

Lifters should have a slight convex shape on the bottom and the cam lobe is not ground perfectly flat. This makes the lifters rotate in the lifter bore and reduces wear.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hotrod46

Flat tappet cams mate to the lifters after a very short period. If you reuse the lifters that were in the engine and keep them on the same lobe they came from, then you could get by with reusing it. .This means marking where they came from at disassembly of the engine. If you didn't do that, thnn trash that cam and get a new one. Rebuilding an engine costs too much in time and money to chance it.

Lifters should have a slight convex shape on the bottom and the cam lobe is not ground perfectly flat. This makes the lifters rotate in the lifter bore and reduces wear.

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I don't want to start an argument as I wouldn't reuse one of todays flat tappet cams, but I have an Isky 30-30 cam out in the garage that so far has been in 3 different engines without any problems and new lifters were used each time. The cam was ground in 1964 and was first used in a 265 punched to at least 292, it was a 55 block, next in a 283 I had in a 57 Chevy and last in a 400 I had in a 62 pick up.

Couldn't argue with results. In this day, I wouldn't build a street engine without including a roller cam, just for piece of mind. I have lost cam lobes on properly broken in cams, that where in service before the oils were changed.

The last engine I messed with was a good running SBC crate engine. It needed gaskets so I decided to check the cam while it was on the stand. Sure enough, two lobes looked bad. I replaced it with very small Howard's retro fit roller and that engine is running great. Prior to that, I lost a lobe on the 383 in my 46. Rollers have become my new minimum standard.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hotrod46

Couldn't argue with results. In this day, I wouldn't build a street engine without including a roller cam, just for piece of mind. I have lost cam lobes on properly broken in cams, that where in service before the oils were changed.

The last engine I messed with was a good running SBC crate engine. It needed gaskets so I decided to check the cam while it was on the stand. Sure enough, two lobes looked bad. I replaced it with very small Howard's retro fit roller and that engine is running great. Prior to that, I lost a lobe on the 383 in my 46. Rollers have become my new minimum standard.

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I couldn't agree more with you. I would never consider buying a flat tappet cam from one of the so called major cam grinders. Isky, Howards, and maybe a couple of others are who I would trust. I have a Howards in the garage waiting to go into the Vette as soon as I can find the time.

Right now I'm under a tight budget so I think I'll reuse the cam and get new lifters for now. Later down the road I want to do another rebuild on it and switch some stuff out like get a set of brand new pistons and some other parts so I might add a new cam and roller lifters to that as well.