Hey guys. I'm thinking about picking up a 350 block and building it up, then find a car that warrants the engine... (thinking 76 or 79 trans am ws6).

I'm relativley new to the whole mechanic sceen (the majority of my experience is with my '85 trans am 305.) I was wondering how much of the work i can do myself on this hypothetical project and how much work i'll have to have a shop do.

- Time is no object
- I'm planning on swapping all of the guts of the engine, so taking extra $ to refurbish old parts won't be neccessary.
- I'm not interested in boring / stroking or machining heads
- Port & Polish -- need an explanation of this term

When shopping for my block, any helpful hints anyone can offer? What to look for, suggestions..etc

Any help is greatly apprectiated... Thanks a lot

 

If you plan on replacing all the internals, you will almst definitley need to have the engine bored and honed.

go to a local engine shop and see if they have any bare blocks that have already had all the machine work done.

I picked up a short block with the rotating assembly put together, a set of re-worked heads, a cam, gasket set, oil pump..etc etc, for 1100$$
that price did not include the intake or distributor.

You can proly pick up a running complete engine from a junk yard for 400 or so, I did that route as well, but when I tore it apart it needed like 600 bucks worth of work, so i got the short block as stated above.

 

Be different, put a Pontiac engine in a Pontiac.

~M~

 

"Port" means you remove material from the ports in the heads to reduce restrictions and straighten out the flow path. This is typically done in the area just beyond the valve seat (called the "bowl" - kinda what it looks like), and by matching the ports to the intake gasket and blending it into the port as it heads for the chamber.

"Polish" is just that - polishing the ports and combustion chamber so that they are smooth. Mostly that involves removing the casting flash and roughness that is left by the factory. The chambers and exhaust ports are polished to a mirror finish, while the intake ports are left with a slightly rough finish (typically using 80 grit sandpaper) to keep fuel from coming out of suspension in the air intake charge.

Standard Abrasives has a good set of instructions telling all about this. I'll have to look for their URL, but the instructions also come in their Deluxe Porting Kit. There is also a tech article on this board called something like "porting 305 heads" that goes through the same routine.