These look like they were used in a rebuilt engine for a short while. Piston tops are not real dirty, ring grooves are clean, pistons and rods are not gunky. They still have a set of .001" undersize Clevite 77 bearings in them with not much wear.
I love rockauto.com! I ordered rings, bearings, gaskets, distributor, timing chain, core plugs, etc and really saved some bucks over what that stuff would have cost locally. Parts should be here Friday! Can't wait to let Jake and Judd start bolting this thing back together! (so we can get it out of the middle of my garage!)
Well, the rings, bearings, timing chain and core plugs showed up today! The rest won't be here until Monday. Boo. But, this means they can do some work tomorrow!
Dan, Momma would probably veto a Beecam! Toooo much powarrrr. That and I'm pretty sure this is a flat tappet block and the retro bits cost more than getting another block. I never could find one anyway (Beecam! in my budget) when I was looking. I fear the days of the 50.00 Beecam! (TM FTW!) are over.
Head story: We have a set of D8's originally from Jonathan's white '84. He gave them to our other Mustang friend, John Turpen. John cleaned them up, did a VJ, added hyd roller springs, better retainers and ground the smog bumps out of the exhaust ports. His intent was to put them on one of our JY Wars cars (the Marky Mark) so he could change the cam in it. Long story short, that never happened and they ended up in my garage. They are the same casting as the heads we have, which is not optimal, but hey, they are fresh and ready to bolt on. The projected CR is 8.6-8.7:1. Cheap gas friendly.
As far as a cam goes, I am looking at the Summit 3601 .471/.417 218/228 @ 0.050 hydraulic flat tappet. It has a wide LSA so it should maintain decent cranking pressure and will probably run good with a 100hp shot of N2O. This is not a roller block so I just can't justify the added expense of retrofit roller lifters and cam. Too much $$$. I will have to change the springs, but that's no biggie. I might actually have a set that would work.
Saturday I popped out the old freeze plugs. It was a good thing I did, several were very soft and there was ton of rusty gunk in there. Eeeewwww.
Sunday, I decided to attack the issue of the 3 head bolts that were broken off below the deck. The lower row on a 302 are open into the water jacket, which probably contributed to them breaking. After considering many ways of doing it, I decided to bolt a head on and use it as a drill guide. I rummaged around and found a brass air chuck that fit tight in the head bolt holes in the head to serve as a drill bushing. It worked really well. Having had to do this once before on a SB Mopar, I knew how hard it is to get centered, and stay centered in an attempt to preserve the threads. Very, very hard. This time I decided to just skip the preservation attempt and went straight to drilling them larger for 351-sized 1/2" bolts. It will have 3 odd-ball head bolts (or maybe 3 studs) on one side, but I don't care.
I need to wash out the water jackets again and then we will be ready to start screwing some of this thing back together.
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