Thread: Wanting to upgrade a 289 in a 65 Galaxie

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this is what she looks like for now.

Originally Posted by RonnSulli

this is what she looks like for now.

I used to race "stock" classes with 302's and 289's, here are some low buck suggestions that I did back in the day. First off we had to run under a 480 lift cam so we went with a comp cams 480 with 270 duration. For valve springs we used 429 "red colored" stock springs with 351c retainers and 351w keepers. Then for heads any of the 351w 68 through 74 will bolt on no problem they have a little larger intake port about 20cc, and 1.84" intake valves stock. The exhaust valves are larger too with a 1.54" stock , we just used the stock 289 bolts never had any trouble where the heads are steel ya know. I would normaly take a straight cut off the heads at .030" and then angle mill them .030" to the point where the two little ebrows on the outer head surface are flush . This will put you around 10 to 1 compression plenty on pump gas. As far as porting the 351w head doesnt need any on the intake port, however the exhaust port you can get in there and wack the emissions bump off the roof of it and then bell mouth it to match a mr gasket header gasket. An 1 5/8 primary header set up is an absolute must for this type of set up, it will be a complete dog with out headers lol experiance showed me. The best intake manifold i found was the dual plain for getting a 4 door 63 galaxie to come off a corner on a dirt track, single plains kill too much torque and dont help top revs much. The intake manifold must be a 302 as the width of a 351w intake is too wide. As far as port maching the intake manifold to the 351w heads use the 351w intake gasket and port the manifold to match. This can all be done with the engine in the car and tipicaly these motors peaked rpm at about 6000 and the torque was improved a bunch over stock. The best thing was I got 18mpg with one of these set ups in a 69 fairlane street machine and it sounded cool and the cam smoothed out at about 1250 rpm, very street / hyway frendly for little to no money on top of 100k mile short blocks lol. Hope some of this helps