Thread: Blown SBC 350. What now??

Tweet

Hey everyone, my name is Drew. Just joined up last night. Already had a great experience in the new member sign in. But now I'd like to share about what brought me here. I recently got a SBC from a friend of mine. He had it in his old 65 C-20. He bought it and never looked into what year it was or anything. He just dropped it straight into his truck. It blew a connecting rod through the oil pan. I got the motor for free because I am storing the truck at my house. My plan is to rebuild the motor with all new internals. I have a long list of parts I want from summit racing. I plan to send the block off to get pressure tested and bored .030 over. Thinking about having it decked too. Need Pros and Cons on that. When the motor is done I am either going to do a sweet C-10 build with rat rod style paint, lowered about 2 inches with the 18" American racing wheels. Or I'll stuff it in an old late 80's camaro. I don't really have a cool plan for the camaro. I have a few pics I'll post as soon as I figure that out.
Thanks for reading. List of parts to come to see if I am crazy or not.
Drew

Is this forum available on the app tapatalk? I know I can post pictures through that app. It keeps telling that there is an error uploading.

Drew, it normally takes getting a few posts under your belt for the system to accept posting photos, or so I'm lead to believe.

As far as parts, my best advice is to not buy ANYTHING until you have the motor completely torn down and checked for water leaks, cracks, etc. and have a complete build plan written down on paper.

We could start gettin' ahead of the game by finding out what motor we have for sure. You have no idea what year and what hp build the motor was unless you purchased it new from Chevrolet and it has not been out of your sight.

Lets begin with the block casting number. It's on the rear of the block on the driver's side, just in front of the bellhousing mating surface....
http://www.speednik.com/files/2013/0...asylum-com.jpg

The suffix number will be on the passenger side block deck just in front of the cylinder head and very close to the top water pump bolt on the passenger's side....
http://www.nastyz28.com/2gcog/blkvin.jpg

Many machine shops take a few thousandths off the block to level the surface and insure that the motor won't spit out the head gaskets. This is normally done when the block is bored and honed for new pistons and rings. Thing is, if you're going to deck the block, you need to determine the stack of parts that you will use in the block when you build the motor. That way, you can take a cut on the decks that will provide a zero deck and provide an excellent squish with a composition gasket. First though, before any of that, you would want the shop to check the main bearing bores for being round and parallel. If the mains aren't valid, nothing else will be valid.

Find a shop that indexes the block decks exactly 90 degrees apart to cut the decks. If the decks are off just a little bit, then the heads will be off and the intake manifold will be off and the motor may not seal up at the manifold/head interfaces. I have seen fellows chase an oiling problem and never find it because of the angle difference between the manifold and heads, causing a gap on the bottom of the gasket that allows the motor to pull oily crankcase vapors into the cylinders on the intake stroke. There is way more to this engine building stuff than you might think.

.

.

Drew, don't know about tapatalk, but it sounds like you picture files are probably too big. If I take high resolution files I reduce them to "medium" format, which is the norm for attaching to emails. Here's a link to an explanation - http://www.clubhotrod.com/shop-talk/...es-thread.html

So I have the numbers the first is the casting number 14010207. From this number I was able to find that it is a 350 from 1980-1985. The website I was on also said something about a left or right hand stick??
Next we will move to the suffix number (s). I have found 2. They're nearly stamped on top of ever other.
T1018tda
830033fac
I'll be honest and say I have no clue what to do with these.
I also found on the camshaft
11/07/87
760
Not exactly sure what those numbers mean either.

T1018tda. The motor was built in Tonawanda, New York on October 18th, 1980 as a 350 for use in a C-10 or C-15.

.

T1018tda. The motor was built in Tonawanda, New York on October 18th, 1980 as a 350 for use in a C-10 or C-15.

.

That's amazing! How did you go about finding that information? And thank you very much.

Originally Posted by SBC350

That's amazing! How did you go about finding that information? And thank you very much.

34_40 told you there were some very knowledgeable people on here on your other thread.

You've met just one of them.

Techinspector1 (Richard,) has forgotten more than most folk ever knew.
An erudite man.

And welcome to CHR from downunder!

Knowing tech, he has it microfiched on the inside of his eyelids.

I'd use the old adage "He's forgotten more about engines than we ever learned", but I doubt he has forgotten that much.

Haha this is probably true. I love learning from people like that though. That have such a vast knowledge of this stuff. I can't wait to get further into this tear down/build to pick yalls brains more.