Hey ya'll, I just finished building a 350 sbc, dropped it an 83 Camaro, got it fired up, and it sounds beastly! Just wanted everyone's opinions on this engine combo, and also I was wondering what I should set the base timing to (like, at idle with the vacuum advance disconnected).

It's a 350 small block chevy out of an 88 suburban, bored .040 over, with flat top hypereutectic pistons, moly rings, bimetal bearings, high volume oil pump, and all ARP fasteners. Stock rods and crank. Stock LO5 (193) heads rebuilt. Valvetrain is a Proform gear drive, a Comp Thumpr Cam (flat tappet hydraulic 279TH7), Summit one piece chromemoly pushrods, Crane gold race 1.5 full roller rockers, and Crane springs. Induction is a stage one Summit intake with a Holley 650 (vacuum secondaries). Also have Headman Elite HTC headers and a coil-in-cap style HEI distributor.

Any opinions?

 

The heads will be a bottle-neck in your performance. Other then that it seems good.

As for the timing, I would start at about 10 base and play with it from there.

 

You're around 10.2:1 compression, so take it easy on the timing. More like 4-6 degrees initial.

 

Yeah, I have no idea how far in the hole the pistons are sitting, but figuring 64cc combustion chamber, 5cc for the 4 valve reliefs in the pistons, and stock type felpro head gaskets I calculated like 9.8:1... Still kinda on the high side for iron... Runnin 93 octane premium through it though cause it's more of a fun car than a daily driver...

I figured the heads would be easily the worst/only bad part of this engine, but I guess they'll be ok for now... Needless to say with the cam and gear drive though it sounds a little more fierce than it really probably is lol...

Another question. With running this big of a cam, would there be any benefit to running two breathers on the valve covers rather than running one breather and one PCV valve? I stuck a PCV on there for now but I'm thinking it might idle a little better if I just capped the PCV port on the carb and ran a breather, since a PCV is kinda like a small vacuum leak... Any ideas about that anyone?