Originally Posted by sofakingdom

That stamping code, and the casting number, tell you NOTHING about "the engine" you now have. All they tell you, is what BLOCK you've got.

NOBODY takes a 35-year-old motor in totally original unmolested untouched condition and jsut sticks it into an almost 30-year-old hot-rod car. While certainly "possible", I'd describe the odds of such a thing happening as "quantum mechanical": lots and lots of zeroes to the right of the decimal point before getting to the first non-zero digit.

More likely, that engine has been "rebuilt" somewhere along the line. That means, somebody tore it completely down, put the block in a giant pile of blocks, the rods in a giant pile of rods, the cam in the trash, the heads in a pile of heads, etc.; sent each of those piles of parts through the renewal process appropriate to it, in a mass-production sort of fashion; and at the end, reached into the pile of "renewed" blocks and picked up one, the pile of "renewed" cranks and picked up one, the pile of "renewed" rods and picked up 8, the pile of "renewed" heads and picked up 2, pulled a cam out of a box of probably 24 generic replacement ones, and 8 pistons out of a simialr crate; and assembled it. EVERY SINGLE PIECE could very easily, in fact more likely than not, have come from a different "engine".

I think you can safely de-assume that you're looking at whatever "engine" that "code" refers to, and instead, accept that you only have that BLOCK. You don't have the pistons, cam, heads, or any other parts of it, that actually determine what "engine" it is.

All you know, thus far, is that it's a 4" bore block; meaning, a 302, 327, or 350 (or 383 even), but NOT a 283, 305, 307, or 400 for example.

If you want to know what THE ENGINE is, you need to know what pistons are in it, which you have to VISUALLY INSPECT to get that info if y ou weren't the one that put them there; what cam is in it (see "pistons" for how to tell what it is); what heads are on it, which you can get the head casting number to tell you; and then of course what machine work was, or wasn't, done to it in the process.

None of the rest of those numbers is of the slightest value toward identifying the "engine".

Get that other info and we can tell you more about what you've got.

In the meantime, if all you're trying to do is buy parts for it, very little of any of that matters. You can make up whatever application you want people to think it is just picking from Chevy vehicels (car or truck) with a 350 from about 73 to 79, and tell em you want spark plugs, oil filter, etc. for it; and it won't make any difference to what you get, because they're all pretty much the same.