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This is my shopping list. I'll pick up gaskets and valve seals at O'Reilly's since they are cheaper there than summit. Worst case I break this engine and it'll force me to build the engine that's been sitting in my shop for 6 months.
Or just LS swap it... lol. I bring my 90 K5 Jimmy home tomorrow after it sat in a body shop for 14 months ( worked on maybe 5 days total out of those 14 months lol) and get to finally drop my LS3 between its framerails.
I thought about it but I went to a show recently and there were so many ls swapped vehicles it was boring. I'm going to keep this one old school.
And I get the shop thing. When we took my dad's 77 bronco in to be finished up they said 6 weeks and $15k. 4 months and $18k later and we get it back and let's just say we weren't exactly thrilled with what we got back. But it's back and we've got it 90% done.
I don't know how much mine will be.. had zero exterior rust to start with and it was all interior based mostly from sitting with a water leak. I don't want to paint the truck but once it drives again I probably will get a cheapy single stage paint job and take the opportunity to seam seal it all. I'm not exaggerating how much time they worked on it or how long it was there. They just never did anything... finally straightened the frame and put a new reciever hitch on probably last October ( dropped it off last week of August 2018) and then it sat until may ish for them to do the front metal repair... then sat again until last week and they finished it. When it wasn't being worked on it sat inside a heated building so it was just free storage lol.
Mine will never see a car show in its life or sit around with its hood open... I like 500 plus hp and a relatively smoother idle... not 250 hp and "being different" lol. I had to build a gen 1 for a buddy but I wouldn't let him do some boring truck engine for his Firebird formula. I am taking the heads to get the decks milled to bump my compression where I want it this week and then do top end assembly. It's a solid roller 210 afr headed 383 I will to spin to about 8000... more or less a circle track engine. There you go.. different lol. And a sad note is this might make 25 to 50 more hp than my LS3 but be a complete misery while mine sits idling with the a/c on.. or pushing snow with a western mid weight blade in the winter lol.
Truck doesn't sit outside and I am going as cheap as possible. If he didn't have to prime the one rear quarter it would stay with the original paint and not get painted for a long time. It's to be a driver paint job I don't care about rock chips and whatnot on.
This truck is just a rock crawler//play around toy so I don't mind running old school. The roller engine I've got sitting in the shop I'm planning on doing a Holley Sniper EFI system on it but otherwise it'll be alumnium heads, 10:1 compression, balanced, with a decent cam but nothing that can't crawl rocks or sit in traffic without overheating.
This 383 I have to build is going to start life with a carb and then buddy wants to put efi on it. You know the funny thing is he complained he didn't want an LS initially because he didn't want to deal with wiring and fuel injection (guy is an industrial electrician so I find that comical). Now he wants efi on the small block... and since he has a couple LS powered junkers kicking around he wants to do an LS swap in some other car ( he has like 20 third gen f body cars lol).
The only reason I did this 383 is it's coming together very cheap... what he is getting would be 15 to 20 grand or more from a shop. Oh well lol.
Took a look at these heads and they are rough. Coolant ports are rusted and half clogged, heads are greasy and nasty from a 100k miles of build up. Local machine shop is going to clean them, magnaflux, square them up, new guides and seals, lap the valves, and assemble them for $350. Worth the money to me to make sure they are in good working order.
10-06-2019, 09:31 PM
