Author: Dave Williams; dlwilliams=aristotle=net

This 375 Windsor was originally built for David DeHaven's early Mustang. For various reasons it took a long time to finish this one. I had to make a bunch of tools, some parts had been discontinued, some parts had been updated and no longer fit, and some were just plain bad. Plus a lot of plain old weird stuff kept happening.

The engine finally got finished in February '01. Dave and I met in a cold, windy Denny's parking lot in Missouri and wrestled the completed engine, two Honda motorcycle engines, and assorted "stuff" from my truck to his.

The "coffin" in the background is an old waterbed frame; part of it became my engine run stand later. The "garbage can" is the safety shield from my Coats spin balancer. Like most ill-designed "safety" equipment it was more hassle than it was worth. Coats thought they made it nonremoveable by welding the hinges to the main machine frame. That took only a few minutes with the air cutoff tool...

351 Windsor rod, 5.95" long, takes 2.311" bearing, .912" pin

360 Chrysler rod, 6.125" long, takes 2.130" bearing, .965" pin

350 Chevy rod, 5.7" long, takes 2.100" bearing, .927" pin

Federal-Mogul stopped making the bushing, and I couldn't find anything else close. Since these rods didn't have to be set up for floating pins, I decided to use 1018 steel tubing instead. I made a lathe fixture to hold the thinwall tubing round while turning then OD, another to hold it for turning the ID, and drove the bushings into the rods with a hefty .005" interference fit. I thought nothing short of dynamite would remove them. I took them to the rod machine and honed the pin ends to .925" for .002 interference on Chevy pins.

I heated the first rod on the heating fixture, swung it over to the piston, already waiting in its locating fixture, and... the interference fit bushing fell out on the floor and rolled under the bench. WTF? The outside expanded as expected with the heat; for some reason, the bushing didn't. When I told some other shop guys about it they got big laughs, "yeah, that always happens." I took the MIG and tack welded the bushings in place, ran them back over the honing mandrel to make sure they were still round, and then started assembling the rods and pistons.

Since I already had some of the pistons hung I made it so I could check rods with the pistons on them.

I found this out during the trial fit. The crank, cam, one rod, and a piston were installed, with one of my special undersize wristpins. The exhaust valves overlapped the reliefs by .050" or so.

I needed a piston holding fixture anyway, so I made one and flycut the exhaust valve reliefs for proper clearance.

During the build, the price of forged Chrysler pistons went from $180 to almost $400, and the $125 Chevy pistons went to $250. I bushed the Chrysler rods to take Chevy pistons and used them to save money.

I dug through my extensive cap collection and wound up having to pick a couple of those, plus sacrifice a good Windsor block to get five caps that were close. But they weren't quite close enough. I had to haul it off to Little Rock and pay $125 to have it align bored.

AB was driving my truck, so I pulled the passenger seat out of the Escort and rolled the block into the floor from the hand truck. It's actually easier to haul a block around in the Escort than it is to back the truck into the shop where the chain hoist is.

Back when I was trial fitting the engine pieces I had degreed the cam. It wound up 20 degrees advanced. I checked it half a dozen times, then checked a known-good cam just in case I was making some stupid mistake over and over. Nope, it's 20 degrees off. I finally called Iskenderian, who told me to just send it back. They replaced it without comment. I should have realized that being off that far would do dramatic things to the valve to piston clearances, but noooo... after degreeing the new cam it was apparent the pistons would need to be cut again.

The lifter valley is painted with Nybco white epoxy paint. I can't find any local place that still sells it. The VHT white turns sort of yellowy when it gets oil on it, while the Nybco stuff always stayed bright white.

There's no real reason the lifter valley has to be painted; I just think it looks nice.

Fortunately I hadn't bent any valves checking the clearances. All cylinders passed the vacuum tester check.

The mirror finish on the cylinder walls takes a while to generate with the hone. That's what Speed-Pro calls out in their instructions, though. Cross hatching the cylinders went away with chrome rings; moly rings want a smooth surface.

I'm setting the valve lash with a dial indicator. Some people like to play spin-the-pushrod and count turns on the lock nut, but the dial indicator is more accurate when you're using poly-locks, which tend to change their height when the lock nut takes up the slack in the threads.

The Far-East timing cover fit okay... but the four oil pan bolt holes on the bottom were metric! I had actually dug out four compatible-pitch metric bolts from my bench stock when I realized it would be a really nasty thing to do to someone; the holes were close enough to cross-thread a 1/4-20 oil pan bolt in to, either breaking off the bolt or stripping the hole. Just the ticket when you're laying on the ground trying to put the oil pan back on. I retapped the holes to 1/4-20. Now it doesn't have four weird pan bolts. Details, details...