i found a 350 4 bolt main and the owner says it has a 010 high nickle containt. what does that mean??
he wants $150 for the engine block. or $250 for the heads, crank, flexplate, rods oil pan and i think pistions.
is that a good deal?

 

Everbody "says" that; but it's nto exactly true.

It has to do with the way they make blocks. They start out with plates that are the shape of the various parts of the block; then they pack sand into a mold, around a sort of "assembly" of the plates; then they remove the plates, put them into another mold, and pack more sand around them while they cast some molten iron into the prior one. And so on.

Then, it's possible to add different quantities of other metals to cast iron, to change its properties. For whatever reason (I'm not one of the kind of people who would know exactly), they add nickel and tin to the cast iron that blocks are made out of. I don't know if it keeps the water jackets from rusting as much, or makes it easier to machine, or makes it wear better where things rub on it, or what; but however that may be, at some point in the late 60s, they decided to pour SOME blocks out of better metal than others.

According to people who worked in the casting foundry at the time that the whole notion of using the different metal and indicating the blocks' metallurgy by way of different plates, they discovered REAL QUICK that it was more trouble than it was worth to try to keep it all sorted out; so the guys on the factory just made the blocks all out of the same metal, and the plates got TOTALLY randomized within a very short time (a shift or 2 maybe?) of whenever the decision was made. Since no blocks failed QC, it was apparently quite some time before management noticed it; and when they finally did, they abandoned the whole project, and just let the floor keep doing what they were doing: randomly using whatever plates they grabbed to cast whatever block they were casting.

So, all blocks from whatever date it was on, are made of the same metal, no matter which plate they put on there.

So, that particular block has less than a 1% chance of being high- anything. The later it is, like if it's much past about 69, the chances dwindle to just about zero.

Which of course, doesn't keep it from being a good block; it's perfectly fine, as far as that goes. As long as the things that REALLY MATTER are OK, like casting shift, the thickness of the cyl walls, and so on, in the castings; and the location of the lifter bores (whether they're pointed straight at the cam), the distance from the crank to the starter bolt holes, the perpendicularity of the cyls are to the crank axis, and some of the other bad machining; and other things that actually DO make a difference to how useful it is, then it's as good as any other block.

$150 for a bare block or $250 for a torn-down core is a bit steep IMO but not totally outrageous; IF it's all good, and unmolested. If it's already .030" over, pass.

 

If the timing cover is off you can check for more casting numbers behind the cam gear which may give an indication of nickel content. Normally the 010 castings are more favored than any other casting. They're slowly disappearing but can still be found pretty cheap since hundreds of thousands if not millions were cast.