BAD TO THE BONE 400 Small Block Chevy Build (1 of 3) - 67 Camaro Pro Touring Build

a bad to the bone 400 naturally aspirated small block so we have been trying to build this engine for almost two years now and we are finally around to it got all the parts and pieces and we got the man the myth the legend thousand hp craig let's not get carried away now so we already had a small block build on our channel the 350 so this video we're not showing you how to put together a small block we're just showing you how we're going to put together a small block yeah how we're doing it and what and what parts we're going to use in it yes so this isn't your average run-of-the-mill small block we're mostly going to be focusing on the nitpicking meticulous stuff that a lot of people don't do so a lot of the rocker geometry setup uh checking the bore sizes and how to set all that with the main bearing size yeah so there's a lot of trick parts let's not waste any time i don't know how many parts this video series is gonna be if it's gonna be three or four i'm not sure as many as it needs to be just buckle down get your popcorn your skittles let's do it come on [Music] now we're putting together the 400 small block that is a dart pretty much dark headed dart it's all dart for good old dave's 67 camaro so this is what we're going in here we got a dart s shp is hp shp special high performance i got this block from dart fully machined how you see this is pretty much the wash it i mean we had to wash it again but it's supposed to be prepped ready to go it has 350 mains it's a splayed cap main cap you know four bolt they already added the freeze plugs they did final hone um they put the the cam bearings in it i mean it's ready to go all the plugs are in it what started this whole build is i bought i had two two separate friends two separate buddies that were selling engine parts and i was gonna combine you know take this guy's stuff and this guy's stuff and fill in the voids and build a small block it turned into this it's pretty much an all-new small block nothing's really used so now we're gonna uh verify that our piston wall clearance is right we already checked it with a dab or gauge and now we're gonna go through and spot check it with an inside mic and an outside mic and just confirm that our measurements are 100 correct so are your measurements 100 correct we're going to find out a minute so now i'm going to measure the piston for verifying our piston to wall clearance and with the instructions that come with most pistons they give you what they refer to as a gauge point which is where they want you to measure the clearance at in this case it's giving you 500 thousands down from the bottom of the oil ring land so i've already taken the time to mark that very lightly uh put a mark on there to be able to measure that accurately i like to use a little bit of a weight instead of holding it at my hand it's a little more accurate to have the piston sitting flat and they better balance the mic with both hands come in get the points of the like across the center of the gauge point and then take your reading and confirm it's what we want so so is that what we want uh yes yep it's uh within two tenths of the manufacturer's recommendation so yep that's all we want so first we torqued all the mains on without the bearing shells in them to verify that the housing boards are all the same size once you've verified that we're going to go in and in this case since we know the sizes are the same i just twerked a number two main cap on and verifying the clearance between the inside of the bearing shell to the od of the crankshaft in this case i've verified it uh with an inside mic to verify that uh my measurements are what i think they are what they should be some people use downward gauges an ncmi can be just as accurate if used properly so i use a very light drag to sweep through the bearing and then i use the same measurement with the od of the mic and sweep that and verify my clearance is what we want it to be [Music] so mr craig is in the process of gapping the rings and to describe this to you that don't know we got these rings here for the four 125 bore size so they when you put them in they touch as you can see right here they touch so what he's doing is he is sanding it down for a 20 000 gap that's what we're shooting for on the uh the top ring on the pistons this is what the 20th 000th 20th how do you how do you say that 20 20 000 this is what the 20 000 gap looks like you might not be able to tell it on camera but it is very small very small a dart actually machine finished machined this block and honed it and we're going to verify that they honed it properly so we're going to check the surface roughness with the tool that i have it's an older mitutoyo profilometer and it actually has a device that sweeps up and down the bore with a little needle point and measures the abort finish and then gives it to us in a report and with his older machine it has a printer so we can actually print off the report and save it with the engine build and we're focusing on three areas called rpk rvk and rk and companies like total seal provide a lot of great information for what we're looking to do for for any particular application and it varies from race engine versus street so this engine has a 12 pk a 46 uh rvk and a 33 rk which is very good and right in uh kind of the guidelines of what total seal recommends for a high performance street engine uh dart did a good job and everything checks out what the mains wanna be in two point two point two and a half two nine five two six on the mains with coated coated uh clevite h series and then like i said it has a coated cam bearing so one of the coated mains and rods so it's really really nice deal so the crank that we're using we had to add craig balanced it had to rebalance it you had to add some weight because the new assembly um pretty much in the pistons because it's the same rods and crank that were used in the previous combination i bought this like i talked about from a previous buddy he ran this in his car he changed the block because he went to a pro charger still standard standard on the bearings but he rebalanced it because my piston pin setup is heavier than what was previously used so we're running a scat crank just the 350 mains 375 stroke so it's the 400 the standard bore so it's a 4.125 bore on the block right yeah standard 400 six-inch rods it's got a six-inch hp rod that we're running in it we got new rod bolts because the rods are used so we got the we got it all prepped here ready to put the crank in it yep crank's going in craig's dying to do it you can't wait to put this thing in here wait so he's feeling strong so leave it all to him man for sure right [Music] there you now you notice when he put the crank in here that he didn't didn't start spinning it and going crazy with it like like i mentioned when they we built the other small block is it any need to set the crank in here and give it a couple of spins not really not until you get the other main capsule and i put the i put one through four main caps on get them snug down then i start checking and playing uh there is times that i'll check it if i'm concerned about something unusual i see an on a used engine sometimes i'll check it before i put them in all the main caps on no sometimes i'll go by field just to start but if i feel that it feels tight but i'll get the one through four main caps on and then i'll get my dowel indicator out and then i'll just do a rough check first on the thrust on the thrust with no main cap on the rear and i'll see what it is because what it has with no main camp on it should be what it is after the engine is assembled right so if it has five thousandths now with the four caps on it should have five after i put the main cap on the back because if the cap's not set right it can lose you can lose all of your input what's going on so this is a wore out tube of uh cmd number three it's what you find on the backyard maybe dart uses this exclusively for all the fasteners a lot of engine builders use it with uh all of their fasteners started a nascar really popular nascar guys in the 80s and 90s and it's kind of just morphed out of there i hope that's not when you picked that tube up it almost looks like it [Music] we're rough checking the end play i put caps one through four on the engine uh torqued them down and now i did i did a quick check i was using my screwdrivers but now i just did a quick rough check here to verify that it has the appropriate amount of air in play without the main cap on the back as you notice the number five main cap is missing so now we'll go ahead and lube it up put it on torque it down and verify that we have the same amount in play to confirm that the cap is set in the place where it needs to be for the thrust parting lines to be made up and aligned with each other so it's not influencing the crank one way or the other because if we don't have end play it'll burn the main thrust out of the engine and we'll be taking it back apart and sad we want to do that let's not do that a lot of people like to use a hammer a sand tight mallet and beat it back and forth which is okay something i've done for years that i learned tricked from an old timer to get the counterweight up so you learned a trick from yourself and to rock the crank back and forth between a torqued main cap on the counter on the counterweights here and it tends to set the main cap much more accurately than trying to beat it because a lot of times when you hit it with a sand mallet it just kind of springs back and doesn't really take a set this way you really move the crank through its range and it kind of holds the cap in place and then once you have the same end play that you had before then you can go and tighten everything down [Music] i cut my legs off to work on this one so as you see we got the crank all done here all the main caps are torqued and play rechecked to verify that it was the same so we did this to um dart specs so 65 on the center ones and 35 on the outer we've got 4 thousandths in play we're ready to start putting a piston in here and doing some mockup oh man you haven't seen the pistons yet man look at that keep moving it on me man see man the cranking rods i got are from a friend of mine um i guess we'll keep him nameless i don't think he wants to be talked about but he was uh the engineering guy at bme pistons and he's the one that designed these pistons and he did the engraving everything for me so i had to get a new set of pieces because his setup was similar to this but he had a problem with his timing chain stretching or something happened and his valves messed up the pistons that was in his his stock he had n a configuration deal that he ran and drag week and stuff and and he wound up having a problem with the timing chain so he's the one that designed the piston so they're really trick i like that he did it that the pin is not in the in the lower groove so you don't have to run the the spacer and then it has a nice radiused pocket for the valve relief so you don't have the sharp sharp hot spots on the pistons it has a nice flow so turned out really good so we're going to get the pistons on the rods here and we got the rings the total soil rings already gapped we can get them all set up here we're gonna get the pistons put into the into the deal into the block here [Music] so we're just going to do a quick mock-up here i put a second ring on only and we're going to go ahead and put this piston in and uh do a quick walk up and it didn't go there dang it take two videos ruined come on [Music] so we want to make sure the piston's square in the board this is a mistake that a lot of people make so first i zeroed the gauge out here sit at zero come over to the piston make sure it's it's on this side it's minus ten go to the other side with a bridge and make sure that it's exactly -10 the piston can rock in the bore a lot and you want to make sure that you have it perfectly square so you don't trick yourself on what your piston in the whole dimension actually is [Music] it's always a good idea to check the rod the rod bolt the throw of the rod with aftermarket rods in the block when they cast this they they put a little cast in here for clearance of the rod bolt coming around but you want to check on the bottom of the cylinders also make sure everything's going to make it because the oversized big end of the rod will will hit the block and in the bottom of the skirt so that's what we're just checking there just showing you where where the rod is going to come around to throw and and see where it would hit in different spots but everything looks good they set the block up really nice so old craig man left me unattended here so i'm gonna put the i'm gonna put the camshaft in this thing while i'm waiting for him to come back we got the clois timing chain this is like i think the top of the line of the clois that you can get here it's got the billet pulley and then this is the z chain it's supposed to be the best deal for the conventional small box chevys this isn't the original cam that i bought when i bought all these parts to get this thing like i was talked about i got parts you know for two different buddies craig didn't end up liking the camshaft that i had so he got this is a custom grind it's a comp cams but it's it's a custom grind that he came up with because of the cylinder heads when we get to that the the heads that i initially bought were damaged and that's kind of what started this whole process is i sent the heads to craig to get fixed uh and they were they weren't repairable so started out we got a brand new set of heads and then they wanted it being better than the original set so anyways so that's what we got going on so this is a custom grind we'll go over the specs here in a little bit i'm going to get put in here i'm going to use the sprocket it comes with the thrust the roller bearing i put a little bit of oil on it on the bearing i'm going to use a sprocket to put the camshaft in all this is arp so we have arp cam bolts here and arp all fasteners so i'm gonna put some put some lube on it and we're gonna put it in here [Music] so i got the camshaft all put in here it's all torqued we set it up at zero right now we're going to degree here in a little bit but we just just start baseline so we got um got it all installed we i spun it around a full revolution on the crankshaft just to make sure that the the lobes everything's the cam's happy right now it doesn't hit anything so now that the demand the myth uh craig should be back here in a second we're gonna get the rest of the pistons put in it welcome all back so what kind of front engine flex plate do you have going on here this is a special one maybe uh degree wheel so we're gonna start uh degreeing the cam in here we've installed it uh just straight up as per the timing chain right now i've installed the timing the degree wheel the pointer and we have a piston tdc uh i'm using my dial indicator and i a lot of times use a dead stop if we need to i get the same results so i tend to use my dial indicator so i'm just more comfortable with it so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go down a hundred thousandths below top dead center so as the piston goes down we're going down thousandths and i'm going to take a reading and on the degree wheel that's at 16 and a half so now i'm going to go in reverse back up to top dead center and then we're going to keep going past we're going to go down 100 thousandths and go past 100 000 and i'm going to go back into the direction of rotation and very lightly bump my way up to zero again which is a hundred in the hole at that point we are 15 16 and a half so that tells us that the degree wheel is perfectly true to top dead center if we if we were off on number two three numbers on one side of the other we would adjust the degree wheel and do it again until we get it to the point where they match the same side and you could do this at 200 000 in the hole 300 000 won't matter you'll have the same result it'll just be a wider spread so now we know our degree wheel is degreed in to tdc okay so now we move the dial indicator and readjust the position to get it on the intake side so we're going to start with the great intake side in i have this long travel uh indicator here with a 5 16 radius simulates a normal gm style push rod and what i'm going to do is i put the lifters in dry i'll have to lift your bores dry so the there's a lube dragging it up and down which can kind of influence your your degree and what i'm doing is i'm going to verify that that my lifter goes up and down uh nice and clean on its own and returns to zero and is not influenced by anything else in the lifter board there so i'm gonna rotate until i start to see the lifter come off the seat and i'm going to back it up in reverse i'll verify again that that is returning properly sometimes this takes a little little adjustment a little fine-tuning to get this just right which is pretty common there we go so we're going to rotate it all the way through the base circle of the camshaft to make sure that our needle stays where it's supposed to be we've verified that it returns to zero so now in the direction of rotation we're going to go up to 50 thousandths of opening on the intake side right there and we're going to take a reading on the degree wheel it says intake valve is opening 20 degrees here uh before top dead center so we can go to our cam card which is over here and we can compare notes and see where we're at well as for the cam card uh we're supposed to open it at 19. so we're one degree advanced right now opening at 20. so that's pretty close so we'll go all the way through and check it uh on the closing side i'm also going to verify low lift here one two three four and four 28 as indicated here versus 430 thousandths so that's very close that's within the deviation of a indicator so i'm going to go all the way back down until they close let me go reverse my direction and go past 50 thousandths spinning in reverse and then i'm going to go in the direction of rotation on the closing side and i just inch my way up here until i get to 50 thousandths uh away from closing and the degree rule says that we are at a little past 59 and the cam card is calling for 61. our numbers are deviating a little bit here so i'll kind of run through this again and double check it sometimes it's good to check it the same thing a couple times make sure the indicator hasn't moved make sure the numbers repeat and then we'll decide if we want to make any adjustments to it okay so now we move to the exhaust side i highly recommend doing intake into globe and exhaust lobe not just assume that the intake is close or correct so now we're gonna we reset our dial indicator we're on the exhaust side we're gonna rotate around until the exhaust lifter starts to rise there to 50 thousandths just like we did on the intake side and we're going to take our reading and our reading is 65 the exhaust valve opening at 65 and the card's calling for 64. so we're one degree early which is well within the limit of acceptability especially since the chain has not stretched and there's no valve train load on here yet once we assemble all the springs and rockers as a whole package a lot of engines could be you know one to two degrees behind so being a little bit advanced is good for a couple different reasons so we'll all we'll roll all the way through and check the boot valve lift pick low blip rather and we are at 4 35 and just a smudge which is correct because the cards calling for 435 so we'll go back down and close so we'll run out on the base circle there check our zero go in reverse rotation past the fifty thousandths all the way to about a hundred thousands away change direction and closing to 50 000 away from closing again and we are at about 20 and a half close to 21 and the card calls for 22. so there again we're we're about one early on both sides which makes sense so we're going to go ahead and just leave this cam where it's installed now and knowing once the chain gets a little little time on it and we get all the load valve train load springs and rockers everything functioning it'll it'll lose a little bit there too so we're going to go leave this as is and just start checking other aspects of the motor [Music] you would not want the largest dimension of the piston to be bigger than like 4.155 that's really something so as you guys saw mr craig got all the rings put on the pistons along with hanging the rods on the pistons so saw a little bit of the spreadsheet on the pistons earlier in the video but i wanted to talk about a little bit more in depth so obviously you already know the bore is 4 1 and 25 bore so that's the bore on these pistons and as you obviously see it's a flat top piston and it has 4.5 cc's of valve relief on the top of the piston it's got all sorts of other goodies man it's got zhp engraved they look very nice that's worth at least five right there oh yeah plus five for each piston plus five horsepower how about without further ado let's get these pistons thrown into the engine we're gonna see how it all comes together how it looks [Music] [Music] [Music] yes [Music] so there you go we got all of our pistons installed into the engine and man it's hard to beat a zhp garage engraved piston craig says you won't see it once you put the head on there but i don't care you can see it right now so stay tuned for part two next video coming soon we're gonna be installing the heads we'll be showing that in the next video they are some very nice dart heads and plenty more adjusting the rockers with the rocker geometry and the push rods and everything so hit the subscribe button down below stay tuned for the next video hit the like button if you enjoyed it and i'll see you guys

Channel: ZHP Garage

Views: 47,809

Keywords: How to, Cars, Car work, Mechanic, Master Mechanic, Classic Cars, Old School, Carburetor, Garage Restore, Restoration, Mobile, Fixed, ZHP Garage, Ziegler Garage, ZHP, Ziegler Racing, Street Car, Race Car, Drag Car, Car Shows, Classics, Fabrication, Welding, 400 SBC, SBC, Small Block Chevy, Small Block, Dart small block, ZHP Pistons, BME pistons, Scat crankshaft, Dart block, Custom pistons, Bad to the bone 400 SBC, 400 Small block, Race engine systems

Id: 3_I7aeZCGFw

Length: 26min 18sec (1578 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 20 2022