[Cautrell05]

I suppose drivetrain is next. I knew from the beginning I wanted an old school small block in it because I wanted the vintage look, and I had a 400 block that I've been dragging around for close to 20 years waiting for a project to put in. But unfortunately I found out the hard way that the hood on these trucks is not waterproof. And by that I mean the center strip it covers the seam between the left and the right halves just has tabs to go through holes in the hood and are twisted to hold it in place. There's no actual weather strip, and when you get steady rain it follows those tabs down and it drips right on top of the intake manifold. Now if you have a complete sealed engine it's not a super big deal other than you get water spots and it's kind of pain. But, if you have an engine block, heads intake and valve covers bolded together for mock up with no gaskets, it will drip on the intake enough to eventually run down the intake ports and into the cylinders. I found that out the hard way when I got the engine down to the machine shop and we started tearing it apart. There is several cylinders that had really deep pits from water sitting in them. So rather than go through all the work of cleaning the block and everything like normal, we just put it right on the boring machine and punched the two worst cylinders out to 30 with the intention of if they cleaned up we'd knock all them out to 30 and then backtrack and throw the block in the parts washer. But even at 30 there's still some really deep pits that I don't think 40 would have cleaned up and 60 over on a street motor I just didn't really feel like dealing with it.

So to backtrack a little bit farther last Christmas my wife surprised the hell out of me and she got a hold of a friend of mine who runs machine shop that actually happens to be right next door to where I work now. She picked up the bill ahead of time for all the machine work on my engine. She been working a bunch of extra shifts at the hospital through the big covid rush last year and she wanted to help out and try and give my project a little boost. I think the labor Bill ended up being somewhere around $1,000 between going through the block, going through the heads, assembling and everything. I didn't have the heart to tell her right away that that was just labor and that parts were still additional on that but hey it was still a pretty cool gift.


Bottom end of the engine is a 4 bolt 400 .030 over, I got lucky and one of the guys I was working with at the time had a 72 Chevy pickup that had a 400 in it. So 200 bucks later I've got another block. That one cleaned up good over at the machine shop. Rotating assembly I priced all over, most of them for decent parts were a little over a thousand to 1200. And then from there it could go up to wherever you feel like spending money. The hard part for me is I keep thinking about what I put in my race motors back when running Street stocks, and it keep telling myself do I really need that in this? It's not turning 7000 RPM night after night. I highly doubt it'll ever see 6,000. Speedway motors in Lincoln had a pretty decent deal on the rotating assembly. The standard weight cast steel 400 crank, set a $350 H-beam rods that were probably Overkill but why not, and I believe it said Keith black dished pistons. Compression ratio with my heads should be about 9.5-9.7 to one with the standard head gasket. Cylinder heads are set of cast iron Dart iron eagles that I picked up for $450 assembled. 2.02,1,6 valves, the intake ports are only 180 cc's which if I was looking for all out power they would be choking it out on the top end in that 6,000 RPM range. But because I'm looking for low-end mid-range power the smaller ports will give me a little better velocity. I really wanted to send them out to brezinski's and have a set of camelbacks milled on the end of them for the overall look but they wanted another 400 bucks for that so I opted out. You'll see why in a little bit. For camshaft I don't know if I'm just getting old or what combined with the numerous posts I've seen in the engine forums about flat tappet lifters self destructing. But I just have no patience to break in a flat tappet cam and hope it survives considering the amount of work that I need to do to clean all the metal out if it fails. Ignoring protest from my wallet and maybe that one card that the wife doesn't watch that close when I make payments on I went with the Howard's retrofit roller cam. spent several days looking at different cams doing a lot of reading trying to decide on what I wanted. There's more to it than just left and duration. The big choppy idle sounds nice but they don't always perform that well at lower rpm. And then when you're listening to video clips on YouTube of people that are nice and poster cam specs you got to take into account a smaller engine will respond more to a cam than a bigger one. I'm pretty happy with the cam I picked out. It's got a very solid lope at idle that in gear or out of gear you can't mistake. But in the 50 or so Miles I put on it it's very drivable it doesn't struggle at low RPM that much. And it runs really well through mid-range and top end. Instead of Comp cams push rods and some 15 roller rockers around everything out. I don't remember the length right off hand but the stock length pushrods for a 96 to 2000 vortec 350 are the correct length for anybody else wanting to run one of the retrofit roller cams.