Is there a cheap way to see what compression ratio my car has? Reason I want to know is I just found out I have a 350 block with 305 heads and I want to know if the block is from an L98 or an engine with the same compression, or if its a smog era 350 with really low compression.

Thanks.

 

The only way to know for sure is too tear it all apart and look at the internals. Otherwise, you can speculate that you have such and such pistons (i.e. factory L98 slugs) and run the numbers from there in a compression ratio calculator or some other form, but again, that would only be speculation. If you got real creative, I'm sure you could cc it all, but that's being REAL creative (I've not heard of a method to date).

The closest thing you can do, without a tear-down, is check the cylinder pressure.

 

I'm going to try and track down the original owner who did it. Wish me luck!