blbruegg

Well just thought I'd post on here my second engine swap/build in my '86 T/A.

A little back story...

I bought this about 3 years ago and have been looking at it for about 3 years before that. It has 66,xxx original miles on the body. This was a local car to La Farge WI. Small little village in the valley between Viroqua and Hillsboro. The first owner had it in high school and had big plans for it... vortec supercharger and all the other dream parts he could imagine up for it. A few years later he sold it to another local guy as he blew up the original 305. The second owner put in a 350 and drove it for a little while with a bad MAF and it always ran so rich that he washed out the cylinders. (He wasn't that car saavy) So he had his cousin..(again not that car saavy) put in a 305 and he never quite finished it. He had cut away most of the wiring harness and lost a good majority of the sensors. He could get it to fire once and then it would never actually run... guess that happens when there's no TPS, MAF, EGR or nearly anything else hooked up but your cold start injector.

Middle of winter I finally talked the second owner into selling me the car for $350 bucks because his wife wanted it out of the yard. YAY ME !!! Cheapest car i've bought outside of demo derby rigs. We took it to the shop and went through every wiring and vacuum diagram in the good ol' chiltons. Got everything wired back up in about 2 days turned the key and what do you know it started !! Good stuff for not knowing what kind of damage we were really getting into. It threw a few codes and was running rich. Of course somebody took the screens out of the MAF and crap got on the element and burnt it out so we replaced that and it seemed to run pretty good. About 2 weeks later I was going along about 80 just cruising down a backroad and it died. Pulled over turned the engine over and it ran ok till i gave it gas and heard the dreaded piston/ rod slap.

OK so once again time for a new powerplant in this puppy. I had an old 350 out of a 70s 3/4 ton pickup in the shed so I took off the intake and swapped it into the car. wouldn't you know... exhaust doesn't quite bolt up on 350 heads. So off with its heads !!! Man the deck was shot on that block, but i had a plan ! Lead mesh head gaskets !!! It's foolproof isn't it? not quite. The pitting was just too bad and it ran with a constant small coolant leak. At this point I was moving and too tired to mess with it so i parked it in some pine trees at my uncle's land. Fast forward a year I finally picked it up on the car trailer (with a fresh battery it even drove itself on the trailer). Drove to Chippewa Falls and dropped it off in the yard to await further brainstorms. A few months later I pulled the TPI setup off once again to start the next swap.

I got ahold of a 92 350 block with about 80k miles on it out of a suburban and put it up on the engine stand. It sat there for a while during the next plan phase. I don't have a lot of spare cash so this was going to be a low budget toquer. Also I knew this was a low compression engine so I'd have to bump that up a bit. Over a period of about 8 months I got all the parts together and got everything in the car. Just had my first startup last night about 8:00 out in the driveway. Here's a list of what I did with my budget. I'll post some estimated HP numbers from my Desktop dyno program later just for fun and laughs.

Fel-Pro 1094 head gaskets (need that tighter quench area)
Dart 165 heads with 1.94 intake and 1.6 exhaust (I'll explain why i went small later)
Crane Cams 10004 camshaft 440 In. 440ex. (I had this laying around from another engine with low miles on it)
Stock replacement timing set
Extra quart oilpan (summit brand... has a little exhaust clearance problem)
High volume / High pressure oil melling oil pump with hardened shaft (idle is exactly 60 psi oil pressure and no my gauge isn't broken )
South Bay 22lb Bosch III Fuel injectors
Port Matched lower plenum on intake to Fel Pro 1204

So with all this you see it's not going to make much in the way of horsepower but it should make some great low end torque. The stock TPI intake I'm told from the machinist flows between 185 and 215. With the little bit of port matching i did that should go up a couple of points. Not much I know but every little bit helps smooth out some turbulence. The heads flow around 225 once again according to the machinist not the advertised 230ish. This makes a pretty good match to the intake as cast. This is also the same head they use on most of the Wissota dirt race cars (Exception of valve size) with much larger 410 cube engines. It has back cut valves and upgraded springs for a max .580 lift. This makes my cam seem small right? Well not quite. The way this cam runs in a TPI is kind of unbelievable. Anything below 800rpm and the idle gets pretty choppy and rumbly like it has a super cam in it. Low end torque is definitely an improvement over stock and the valves (I'm sure due mostly to spring pressure) don't float till about 6,000 rpm. It quits making power around 5500 but that's just perfect for stoplight to stoplight driving.

Hope you enjoyed the short story !