Small Block & Big Block Chevy Specific - SBC college build thread

I'm down to my last two classes at UNOH (University of Northwestern Ohio) and am currently in the High Performance Custom Engine Building course. This is not my engine, the owner wanted the school to hop up his motor that's destined for his hot rod. We have a whole shelf full of performance parts for this thing. We assume that he thought it was a 350, however we bolted it up to the teardown stand I quickly noticed the '5.0L' and '305' stamps on the block. Whoops. We went ahead and tore it down anyway and didn't notice anything wrong with it other than the obvious.:jest: Good thing we have quite a few SBC blocks on the shelf that will most likely work for the build, and the 305 block will make a good training aid for the Engine Machining class. We got it tore down to the bare block today. Hopefully we can start cleaning/prep on whatever block we will use tomorrow.

I snapped a few pics of her and will continue to update this thread with pics over the next month.

The only problem I have with the 305 is the small bore. There is just too much valve shrouding with the small bore to breathe a lot of air. Vortecs are a very good head for this build. AFR used to have a 305 specific head. This head is the absolute best small bore head. The part number was 190SHST. It's been discontinued for quite sometime but I see a set on ebay every once in a long while.

I used this head on a destroked 400 (Large journal 327 crank and main spacers with 6.25" Eagle rods. That thing was an amazing runner.

Found out yesterday that pretty much the whole engine will be junked. We are using a different block, new rotating assy, intake, heads...nothing left of the 305.

Comer, Frichie, Higgins or White? ;)

Comer, Frichie, Higgins or White? ;)

Higgins ;)

If you get a chance, Check out the cnc machine. That thing is sweet. I did my 6.0 block on it.

If you get a chance, Check out the cnc machine. That thing is sweet. I did my 6.0 block on it.

Hopefully I will. I wanted to do a LS project SO BAD in this class but I have a move/wedding/honeymoon/new job all coming up in the next few months so...NOPE!

Sorry about the lack of updates, we had a good bit of lecture to get through. We ended up using another block that was sitting around at school with very little run time on it. The motor is going to be a 355. We stripped it down to completely bare, and put the new ARP main bolts in and checked out the mains. They were all within .0005", so we were ready to go. We put it in the block mill today and square decked it using the BHJ Products fixture. It's amazing how out of square these things can be from the factory. We are planning on boring/honing the cylinder bores tomorrow if time allows.

The rotating assembly showed up today too.:cool: So we went ahead and checked Eagle's numbers, and they were pretty darn close. All pistons were within 2 grams, all rods within 1 gram. We will balance everything tomorrow too.

Yesterday was a pretty productive day. The boring bar has been acting up so we ended up just using the the SV-10 and honing all the bores out to 4.030" We have some good diamond cutter heads so it only took a couple hours. A couple of the lifter bores were pretty tight with for the new hydraulic rollers, so we did a little honing on those too, and chamfered the head bolt holes. The block is now fully machined. Monday we will scrub it down and start mocking it up!

The 355 is going together nicely. We got the crank all balanced, the block fully cleaned up, new freeze/oil plugs put in yesterday.

Today we got the crank in, as well as the cam/timing chain, degreed the cam, CC'd the head and figured out our SCR is going to be 9.57:1. The cam is mild too, the card says it's a 218/224 .495/.502 110 LSA. We measured it to be slightly different, but decided it's close enough for the purposes of this engine. We got half of the pistons in and then ran out of time.

Time for another update. As of today all that is left is the carb, fuel lines, and finishing up cutting the plug wires to length. I might get to run this puppy on the dyno tomorrow! Here are all the pics from the past few days that I slacked on posting.

More... Never mind the ugly soda blasted pulleys, they are only going to be on there for the dyno pulls.

Does he have to pay for any of this? If not I would definately donate a spare LT1 I have to be rebuilt by you guys.

Just parts. Labor is free. However, you gotta know someone. And usually, most students have their own projects. Trust me, I graduated from there and know everyone and have a hard time getting a set of heads cc'd.

Well we got the project all wrapped up today. Supposedly this thing is going in a '40 Ford. Some of these pics are from yesterday, some today. We even got to make a few pulls on the dyno. I don't think it's too bad considering the fairly low compression, unported Pro Comp heads, small cam, dual plane intake and 600 carb. Overall this was a really fun project, definitely the highlight of my experience at this school.

More! The evening Fuels class will do some jetting and timing tweaks to see if this little guy can get to 350hp/400tq.

Looks good man. I wish I would have gone to school for this stuff instead of learning at the hard knocks of life college.