Got a lot done at Bryant's yesterday. Got there at 9am and this is what we had gotten done already from last time. We had installed the balancer and the timing pointer and since we knew our true TDC we made sure it was correct on the timing marks and it was Then I put the alternator bracket that we got from the junkyard and the backing plate of the edelbrock water pump into the sand blasting cabinet and cleaned them up. Here is what we started out with, it wasn't too bad really. Now how beautiful is this?? The backing plate still needed some attention so it went under the wirewheel. God I love that machine. But I was scolded by Bryant's shop buddy Stever for not putting on goggles . . . Everything went into the solvent tank for a little cleaning. Here is the dizzy Bryant had laying around. But it's not the one we really want to use but we can make it work. Here is the water pump bryant had laying around. It's dirty but I'll polish it up a little after it's on the engine. There are 2 gaskets. One is directly on the back of the water pump and the other one between the backing plate and the timing cover. I put a little RTV on the timing cover just around where the water can get out and then some on either side of the gaskets. Here it is installed. The bolts were all wire wheeled and I sprayed them down a little. They looked good so we decided to keep them. A dab of RTV sealant on the threads for the ones going around the water passages and anti-seize copper compund on the shaft of the bolts. Here is another view. Man, that thing looked so close to the balancer but it's not touching. We had to drill out a hole to put the oil dip stick in there. The hole goes in the timing cover. Should have done it before but forgot. Covered things really good and made sure no little pieces of metal got into the engine as much as possible. Installed the spacer and the balancer pulley along with the waterpump pulley since as you may have noticed already we are doing a serpentine setup. There is a great store nearby with every bolt you can imagine. Went and got some bolts, weren't the right ones (the regular bolts you can't get a socket around since they lie so close to the wall of the pulley) so I went back and got some allen head bolts, worked out great. I then installed the bracket and put anti-seize on the ones going into the cylinder head. Just for bolts I spent like $50 this trip since some of the bolts you have to buy in bulk but still much cheaper than getting everything aftermarket with the appropriate hardware so I still lucked out. Now for more toys. Got a blueprinted pump for a steal $50 from Total Performance (the shop that did part of the short block assembly) and the shaft. We went with standard output not highflow.
So the next plan is to have the engine dynod. Now it's gonna be around $450 and that's pretty hefty but I'm really curious what we are making so I wanna go ahead and do it. I know it's a lot and if I'm broke by the time we get to it well then I guess I won't but if I decide to sell the engine down the road it will be nice to have a dyno sheet.
Bryant's humble carb, I think he said it was the 1850 600cfm. My first rebuild, felt awesome and went well. The carb kit from holley locally was $30. Too much detail to take pics but might be a nice writeup sometime. Here was one problem why this carb was retired. We saw that the float was all the way down so we adjusted it properly. All the large parts got a good cleaning. The little guys got detailed attention with compressed air through all the passages. All the old stuff here that came off. All the little pieces, and there was a good amount. Looks puny without it's other appendages. Final thing assembled. It was hot and we needed lunch and it was ME doing the assembling otherwise I think one hour, maybe 2.
Now, faaaaar from happening still since I wanna drive this car around NA for a while. But here is a little sneak peak at what's coming soon. Bryant the evil genius and I have some good tricks up our sleeve for this little fella.
I want to build a 331 also... did you have to clearance the block like you do on a 347 ? And if its not a roller block am I wasting my time ? Awesome build, and info by the way
my block was already clearanced but I don't think it was necessary since when I checked it, it was a good distance away from hitting the cylinder skirt.
Lots of progress today and some good learning. Since we rebuilt the holley 600 we needed to test it out so decided to do a test run on the car right now. Interestingly I spent $900 on dynotuning this engine with the current edelbrock carb at JBA racing in San Diego and they sucked! My engine hasn't made power past 3,000rpm because we thought the springs were dead on the heads but come to find out after the carb swap that it was the secondaries on the carb that just weren't opening up enough to make power . . . how frustrating. Disconnected the vacuum lines and the fuel lines. Removed the carb which came off easy. Carb came off easy. Nice and clean. We had to remove the nitrous plate to clean the gasket off the surface which for some reason was stuck on pretty good. Here is the two carbs next to each other. Carb installed really easy. Bolts tightened Had a pretty long fuel line so that thing had to get wrapped a little. All I had to transfer from the old carb was the little knob for the throttle cable to sit on which was really easy. Time to tune this carb for this engine. We started out by screwing down the float adjustment down pretty far. Requires a wrench and flat screwdriver. We did this on the front and rear bowl. Then we removed the bolts which are the sight plugs to look into the fuel bowls. We did this for the front and the rear. Basically what bryant did from here on is turn on the fuel pump and turned it off as soon as there was fuel present at the sight plugs. We then turned it back on and this time we screwed the adjustments down or up until just a little fuel was spilling out. That was really simple. Then we ran the carb until the choke was fully open. We hooked up the vacuum gauge which read 15. When we rebuilt the carb we screwed the airbleed screws in all the way, turned them out 1.5 turns each. With the vacuum gauge attached we turned the screw out 1/4 turn at a time on each bowl and came up to I think somewhere 18. The rpm were set somewhere around 700. So then we drove the car for a test drive. Geeeeeeeeeeeez. So much smoother, the car accelerated better and I could easily rev it up to 4500 with good power. Man, I was so mad at those JBA people. In their defense they did say that the secondaries weren't opening up enough but it took them all my time on the dyno to figure that out and they told me they needed another 3hours to tune it up fully (another $450). Now the only problem was that the car would stumble really bad off of part throttle into full throttle. Bryant said it's the power valve. So we went and got a bigger one (10.5) and it really improved it. But still had a little stumble. We go to then mess with the timing and I guess it was set at less than 0 initial timing. We brought it up to 10 and ran it and it just sucked, not much power difference on the bottom and I was having a lot less power on the higher rpm's (past 3K). It also began to detonate really bad past 2K (I didn't realize it til late and drove on the freeway with it for a while, hope I didn't kill the engine). Here is what we did to change the power valve. Removed the front bowl bolts Then removed the front bowl which came right off Removed the front metering block with the power valve in place. Here is what's left on the car. I changed out the power valves and here is the old power valve sitting on the metering block Everything back together nice and neat Here is Bryant setting the timing on the car
some of these pics I post unfortunately aren't true action shots. Bryant here was just tightening things up. We had the vacuum disconnected when setting the timing.
it's been a while since I did work on the engine. I've had a really good time working on this engine that's in the car now. I actually feel a little hesitant to get rid of this 302 that's in the car because it's soooooo sweet and dialed in right now. so here is where I had left off last time, pulled the engine out: These are the valve covers I got for $60 on ebay. Sweet. We had the gaskets already ordered. Cleaned the surfaces, applied anti-seize to the bolts and they slapped right on. This is where the dip stick goes I think on the side of the block but we are putting it into the timing chain cover so we tapped it and put a plug in there. We flipped it over to work on the bottom. The oil pump and drive shaft went on pretty easy. put some red lock tite on the bolts. And then installed the pickup. THere is a gasket between them. Here is the felpro gasket we ordered. it's a one piece, very nice. So cleaned the surface of course. There is a little step between where the timing cover meets the block, that one we put a dab of sealant on. also in the grooves where the curve of the gasket starts we put a dab of sealant on. We still need to tap a plug in for the supercharge oil return so for now the pan is bolted on only enough to get the sealant to seal. We'll be removing this later. Isn't this thing gorgeous? it was $230 and the pickup was another $34 I think. tada!!
