The block has been cleaned, bored, honed, cleaned, and painted with Rust-
Oleum Rusty Metal Primer. Here Ron is scrubbing the bores out with Marvel
Mystery Oil. Even after the block has been washed, you can lift an amazing
amount of swarf out of the crosshatch in the bores by floating it out with oil
- enough to turn a white paper towel silver! This is one of those steps lots
of people skip because it's a pain in the ass.
Here's the object of all the gimmickery - the 302 rod on the left is 5.09"
long. The 283 Chevy rod on the right is 5.7" long. The Ford piston has a
1.64" pin height; the Keith Black stroker piston on the right has a 1.15" pin
height. The rest of the room for the longer rod has to come by reducing the
stroke... and for every .10" you reduce the stroke, you only reduce the stack
height by .05". Fortunately things were close enough to make it work by
going from a 3.00" stroke 302 crank to a 2.87" stroke 289 crank, then offset
grinding it down to 2.75" while reducing it from the 289's 2.123" bearing size
to the Chevy's 2.00" bearings.
After being destroked to 2.75", the 289 crank had its OD turned down over an
inch, to a bit over 5" OD. The crank balanced out just fine with the light
Chevy rods, Keith Black pistons, thinwall wristpins, stroke change, and
lightened counterweights.
A shot of the flywheel. This started as a 50oz imbalance 5.0 flywheel
since it needs to mate up to a 5.0's T5 transmission setup. It took some more
drilling (more than you see here) to bring it down from 50oz to the 28oz the
281 is balanced at. Several pounds came off the crank OD; almost a pound came
off the harmonic balancer by going from 50oz to 28oz, and five pounds came off
the flywheel, 20 down to 15 pounds - and most of that was on the OD. Yes,
this will weaken the flywheel somewhat. Yes, he knows it would have been
better to have just written a check for an aluminum flywheel. Yes, he has a
scattershield.
This piece of aluminum is the baseplate for the independent runner EFI intake.
The curved ends were jigsawed out; now they're being shaped with the die
grinder. One of the 52mm Chevy throttle bodies is visible to the right.
This is a '66 289 4V closed chamber head. I'm opening up the exhaust ports
here. My local sources had come up empty on good 289 heads; these came from a
helpful Fordnatics subscriber.
Sometimes I don't quite get a rod hot enough when heating the pin ends for
press fit pins. The rod will grab the pin before it's quite in position.
Unprintable words. With a lot of lubricant and the press you can scoot the
pin over into position without hurting anything... IF you have a piston that
has adequate support for the pin bosses. Without adequate support, you are
likely to crack the piston.
Aluminum plates being milled for the IR intake. After we got these and the baseplate done, we realized that trying to join aluminum with a MIG welder sucked. Having had little luck with aluminum brazing rod either, we jumped track and tried something else.
Cutting off a slab of 5/16" cold-rolled steel flat for the steel intake manifold. Now we get to machine things all over again...
Ron making patterns for the new intake. For ease of fabrication, he decided to just make little trapezoidal tubes, welded up from four pieces, to go from square under the throttle bodies to rectangular at the heads. He figured the transition from round butterfly to square opening wouldn't be any more traumatic than most normal intake manifolds. I figure he's right.
Wide masking tape over the .040" steel sheet makes it easy to draw on.
Opening the exhaust valves up to 1.50" Chevy size before reworking the chambers. Next step, the intake seats.
Finished combustion chambers. They've been opened up and polished, but rust never sleeps... they'll get hit with a Nyalox abrasive cup wheel to shine them back up before final cutting on the seats and assembly. The Nyalox doesn't remove enough metal to worry about, just polishes things up.
Exhaust porting is done. Anything past this point would be just for show. Essentially the ports have been gasket-matched, smoothed, guides streamlined, opened up in the bowl areas and under the seats, and generally neatened up.
Tapping the heads for screw-in studs. It takes a steady hand to get them in straight. I use a "through tap" with a long taper to start the threads, then finish up with a bottoming tap. It wasn't necessary to cut the bosses down for guide plates since the heads have close-tolerance slots for the pushrods. They're deeply counterbored from the bottom, so it doesn't look like they're close tolerance from these pictures.
Completed head. Those are new 275# springs, should be more than adequate for this engine. The retainers are used Pontiac V8 parts. I had purchased chrome moly Ford retainers, but the spring installed height was too short. The Pontiac retainers are oddball in that they sit higher on their keepers, and things worked out okay. I have the Chevy O-ring seals on the Chevy valves, and I added the Pontiac's steel umbrellas on the exhaust sides. Note they're a bit deeper than the Chevy parts.
Bottom, with vacuum pump for valve seal check. I ground all the chambers smooth, though it doesn't look that way from the pictures.
cc'ing the combustion chambers. Some people use wheel bearing grease to seal the cover; Vaseline wipes up with less fuss.
Mill .060" to raise CR, then plunge-cut the valve perimeters to the edges of the combustion chambers and polish the chambers. I was still able to close it down to 50cc.
The 1.82" 302 Chevy intake valves have been chamfered and then ditch-cut to reduce reversion during overlap. The 1.5" exhaust valves have been back-cut and the faces radiused. They are ceramic coated on both sides.
That's it for now!