Building a 350 Small Block Chevy Start to Finish - Part 1

this was recorded with a live studio audience hello everybody welcome back to the zhp garage hey somebody else's garage yeah not actually the zhp garage it is we're in a loaner garage yeah but we're going to be rebuilding a 350 but when we're starting all from scratch doing the whole whole meal deal so we're going to be doing a short block in this video enchilada so what do you think trick got some new stuff we got some new stuff got some remanufactured stuff give me a nice little small blog look conventional we're going to go over the parts parts that we have for this thing and um get it clean in it and get put it together keep building it show you how to show you how i do it how you can do it a little little tidbit little way start right now so these are the parts we're going to be using in this in this little 350 here it's got some new king bearings standard main standard standard rod we want to get a new eagle crankshaft it's a shame the way it worked out because we would have made it like a 383 or something you know got the block machine first then all of a sudden machine shop said there's something wrong with the thrust on the stock crank so then we had to get a crank so being that we already had the pistons and the board and they're already on the rods so we just got a standard bore or standard strokes this is the 348 stroke 350 crank and we're running got new miller done pickup the drive rod the oil pump the oil pan a little kick out pan single timing chain that's new airp cam bolts and then the pistons are just just a stalker stocker rod stock cast piston 350 rod so it's a five seven rod and it's just a cast piston and then his board um the blocks board 30 over and the machine shop put the rings on here so i want to make sure i'll probably pop a couple of them off and check the clearance on the ring end gap put a couple in the cylinders and it's got um just a basic gasket set then we'll be running a trick flow to use dampener obviously but internal balance 350s are internal balance that's pretty much on the parts we have the cams cam's on its way cam should be here in a little bit so hopefully we'll get the cam installed also and then the block that we have is a stock block that was bored 30 over and it's a 0-1-0 block so it's a this one's a four bolt main got all stripped down in the machine shop already put the freeze plugs in it and the camber new cam bearings put plugs in here for the water water to the point drain so just pretty much needs to be be cleaned but i want to start with um i'm gonna run a cleaner through all the head bolt holes so when we go to put the heads on it we're getting a new set of heads for this also we don't have them yet we're going to set a trick flow heads but that's down the road so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to run i want to clean out all the head bolts so we're going to torque the heads down we get a nice accurate accurate torque but it's it's not you can use a tap on it it's just a little bit because it taps are obviously designed to cut a thread it can more cut this than clean it so it can cause the threads to be kind of weaker so it's better to use this to cleaner so that's what this guy is here so i'm going to run the cleaner through all the head bolt holes and then also i'm going to do it through all the the pan pretty much all the holes for the timer cover and the pan everything that you need a good ceiling ceiling on you want to make sure that they're cleaned out and nothing's you know that's crazy and you can see here looks like it had a broken bolt in the water pump hole so we're going to get that straightened out so we'll get this cleaned out of the way we'll get the holes cleaned up then we'll start putting it together [Music] so we got our block block all cleaned up we got it blown out and we got the crank wiped off so we're going to start out this dry we're going to check check and see the clearance we have in the mains here so you just want to make sure there's a top and bottom to the bearing so obviously the the side that goes with the block has the oil feed in it and the one that goes with the cap no oil feed so you don't want to block off the oil feeds if you get it wrong cap in there so we're going to get the mains in here we're going to put them in dry because we're not going to spin the crank so we'll get the upper ones out of the way here for a second you want to push them at an angle i normally do the lock side he's got a locking tab and then you gotta line up in the in the block so you just get it and you kind of push it over as you get in there so it doesn't grind off all the aluminum and you get a little pile of aluminum here on the on the side and just push it down it's pretty much even on both sides the same deal on the back so your rear cap's got your thrust on it but it's still an upper and a lower has a oil hole in it so same same deal just you can work it in at an angle so we've got a little booger here i don't like see gotta be careful it doesn't do that and gets a little booger in there get that out of there if you gotta watch for it when you push it down in there it can scrape it up it's good now we got it got them all in so we got all the block sides now we're gonna set the crank in here we're not going to put any lube on it because we're going to put you we're going to use a little plastic gauge and we want to check we're going to torque it down and see see how much oil clearance we have in here when you set the crank in there you can see how it has the oil holes and see how this one here is kind of cool because they're chamfered just kind of kind of helps the oil come around as it as it's rotating and rubs the oil around the main bearings so they got them chamfered so when we set this in here you want to put the gauge you want to try to get all these oil holes so that they're not all on the top because that's where we're going to put the little little plastic gauge so we want to check so we're buying one about like so because if you put it close to the oil holes it's going to affect the the reading so we're going to set it so like this all the mains there's no oil holes so grab it like this and we'll just set it in here and we're not going to turn it when we set it in try to go straight down as possible so it looks good so we got a little little deal here let me get let me use a pair of dikes we just want to take a little piece of this want to set it on there straight right in the center we do the same on on every cap on every every cap every main every main journal then we're going to take our taps i want to make sure we got nothing no debris or nothing crazy then we're going to put our bearings in there top side bearings put them in the same way it has a little locking tab just line up the locking tab and push them in to make sure you don't have any burrs on the side and then there's a front just got a little arrow on it so make sure you want to make sure to keep the the caps if you take them off set them in order and then you want to make sure you put them on that all arrows go to the front and then we're going to put on our bolts here we don't want to we want to accurate torque because we want to make sure that our we're checking this how it's going to be torqued down so we're going to use some arp fastener assembly lube so we're going to put it on the head under the head here and on the threads so we can get an accurate reading a torque reading when we torque this down so it's not the note the arrow arrow to the front you got to be careful because see how it sits in this little little uh we want to call it little cradle here a little crater cradle little cradle cradle here so you'd be careful because you could it in here and you tighten it down and it's it's not even doing anything because it's caught on this lip so we're going to make sure you tighten it down that you run it down evenly so it brings it down straight straight in there so somebody marked these they put dots on them but don't ever go off of that make sure you keep them in order you can see that the rear um the rear of the block the rear cap has the it's a two-piece remain seal so i'm just going to leave it out while i'm checking i'm checking this with a plastic gauge we'll put it in after we take it because we got to take the crank back out to lube it and everything so then i'll put the seal in so now we got all the caps on get the last one on here for this is where the oil pump mounts make sure plastic gauge didn't move then we're just going to snug this down i like to start in the center if it doesn't really matter but i just want to you can see how this side has a gap on the cap and this side's all the way down so we want to start over here to draw this down so it doesn't the cap so see how i brought it down and so now we come to this side do the same deal on this one so this side's up over here so bring it down over on this side and come over here and draw it down even as possible you got to make sure you don't want to turn the don't spin the crankshaft as inviting as it looks so now we've got them all snugged down we're gonna go ahead and torque them to 65 foot pounds and then we'll pull back off and see see what it see what it's got i like to do circular motion so i'll start at the outside of the caps double check make sure we didn't miss any of them all right now let's take it back apart again so i gotta break these loose by hand my little impact won't won't loosen them so we're gonna break them loose so then we can zap them out so now we can zap them out now we can loosen them so now we got them all loosened up you want you have to kind of wiggle it a little bit if it's tight in this little girl or a little step but you gotta be careful try not to pull up on it so you're not messing up your your your little measurement so we're gonna pull this up and then now we have some lubricant stuff on here so be careful where you set it don't set it so it can get dirty so we're going to lean it got some some towels over here we're going to set it on the side take all these caps off first and then we'll see see what it see what it tells us how even it is so now we're going to rip off a little piece and you can see on here that one size inches and one size millimeters so depending on on how you like your your measurements so i'm going to use inches then you just kind of compare it here the widest point you see where you're at so we're about thou and a half it's on the cap also so you can read it off of here you see it does the same impression a little over two but under one one and a half we're a little over two but under one and a half or a little over a little under two a little over one and a half so being what this engine is gonna be used for is pretty much stock application that it'll work good we'll run probably like a 5 30 engine oil in it so we know we have we have a decent amount of room in there so we're gonna wipe this all down we're gonna pull the crank out here and we're gonna we're gonna lube it up put the seal in it the remain so we're gonna pop this out did you see the comments now oh my goodness it's got to be in a vacuum-sealed environment no dust at all see that meme about people building their ella a thousand horsepower ls in the backyard in the mud so now we have the crank out we're to we're going to lube up put some assembly lube on our bearings but first we've got to put our rear main in there and you can see that this guy so you want it like this on the bottom so the oil pushes on this lip and pushes up the crank up against the crank and seals it you don't want to have it this way it's going to leak on you so you can use a couple different ways i've seen people stagger them like this in the block which is kind of kind of a pain in the butt stupid i think but so the way i do it is you just carefully put it in make sure not to not to cut it and you could put a little bit of sealant here to seal around it or you could put it all the way around but it does have a nice rubber lip in there so what i like to do is i'm just going to use a little anaerobic it's kind of like kind of like silicone it just never dries up early so i'm just going to put a little a little line from the center here bring it out to the end so when that cap goes on there it'll seal it from the seal to the cap so you don't have any oil it's going to leak past the main cap here out the back you don't need to get crazy not not much not much area in there then make sure you get the seal so the lips inward then when you put it in make sure you put it down so you're not you're not cutting it and you can see that i didn't go all the way over to the edge of the seal because when this cap goes on there and pushes this out it's going to squeeze it over here and you don't want to have a big blobby blobbing mess so now we got the block side in here so now we're going to put the other half into the main cap and then we put the cap on here it's going to squeeze on that i'll show you here we'll clean it up any excess it squishes out and turned out really nice so we'll throw this on the cap so you gotta still be careful because you can flip the other half of it on the cap so you get you know if you want to eyeball it to see which way it's going to go because you could put the seal on on the cap the wrong way so you need to make sure if you need to eyeball it you know it's going to go on like this to seal the same way so it has a lip in the front see it's going to go on like that make sure you don't get it one side flop because then you really have an oil leak then we just need to wipe off our main caps here our little plastic gauge wipe those off throw that bolt on the floor really quick so we're gonna hit some assembly lube on this thing and we gotta be careful you wanna put a little on the on the seal but not to the point that it's going to get all over your anaerobic here so it'll affect the ceiling of it it's a lot of seal going on so we'll just do a little line and i like to wipe it in so we'll just go line line and this has the thrust on it so you want to do you want to get someone thrust also because you can burn it up when you start it and kill your thrust so we'll put a little dab here this stuff is like super super gummy so make sure your fingers clean and just give it a wipe so evenly coats the whole bearing and i mean it's not gonna hurt anything if you put too much assembly lube on here you're just gonna have it leaking at the bottom as you know of the or the top of the block as you're putting it together but it's not gonna hurt anything make sure you get it around the back there for your thrust get it on your front and that little dab you put on your rear there you can just run it up so when it when it comes around it'll swipe it the rest of the way so now we can set our crankshaft back in here we're not worried about where it's indexed at we just we just set it down in there we already wiped it off you want to make sure to go straight so you don't nick your thrust or anything you can see how it pushes on your on your seal pushes up tight so the oil pressure comes in here it's going to push on that lip and it's going to seal your rear main up so just set it there you don't want to you don't want to turn it as as you know enticing as it is to give it a good spin we want to get our caps on here first do a film assembly loop on the bottom side of the bearing just run it even coat then make sure it arrows to the front and i grab the back back cap here so put this one on first so do the same thing on the rear cap with a little dot assembly lube and run it up but you want to make sure that it's it's clean on the on the sides here so it can seal on your you can use silicone here anaerobic either way but just a small amount and you must make make sure that it's it's dry so double check make sure you got your seals on the right way you can see how that line goes right into the where the pan gasket is going to go so once we get a torque down we'll clean out that excess right there so it won't affect the pan gasket so now that i have all the caps on here i'm gonna do the same thing i'm running down snug just pay attention to where the caps are so we'll start in the middle here see it's a little high on this side so draw the side down first okay so on this rear cap it's a little different what we're gonna do is so we're gonna we're gonna torque them all and then we gotta we gotta back this off here i'll show you so let me now we're gonna torque we're gonna torque all the caps so we do 65 again all right so now we got our torque down so now what we're going to do is so now that we know our cap is down straight and even we're going to loosen up you don't you want to just have it have it snug so this cap can float on here so now we have our cap is down there straight but it can move and now we're going to hit our front of our crank and then hit the back of it and we're going to set the thrust so the block side and the cap side is even with each other so it's not offset so it doesn't burn up one thrust more than the other so we're just going to use a mallet so just use a rubber mallet and just whack in the front and that's going to shove it back and then take the back and hit it forward a couple times it's going to set the thrust in the crank and now we're going to go ahead and torque our cap back down so now we've got our cap torque down now we just get a little screwdriver or something and just come in here and grab this while it's still wet and just dig out the extra so it won't affect when you go to seal up the oil pan now we got the the crank all all um torqued down and everything now we can now we can spin it get a little turned out pretty good pretty good so now we're gonna i like to start in the front i like to start at number one so furthest forward furthest cylinder forward is number one so one two three four five six seven eight so you want to throw the crank to be the first point away to give you as much room to um install the rod and then these pistons you get the four valve relief but it has a dot the dot's supposed to go to the front but you want to make sure that the dots to the front that there's a side that runs up against the crank here and there's a side that runs up against the other rod so being this one's in the front this part is going to ride up against the crankshaft because this is the furthest forward and then number two is going to ride on the back so put the the crank at the bottom of the throw of the rod so it has as much room the easiest if you put the piston or the cylinder head the one you're installing all the way so it's straight you can see that the crankshaft is all the way at the bottom of the throw and you can use a couple different ways because you when you put the rod in you gotta you gotta hold the rings so you can put them in because if they catch you could break a ring coming in so you have to use an installer and you can either use one like this you so you put it on here and then you you crimp the the rings down so they're even with the piston let's see this has a little a little bit of slop in between clicks so you kind of got to hold it to make sure the ring doesn't pop out a little bit and catch it but then you would you put it in there you tap it down or you could use one i like to use is you use the one for the bore size and it's tapered so you put it the rod through it and then as you push the piston down you gotta you gotta get the ring started though on the top here it it um because it's tapered it pushes the rings in and then because it's tapered it's pulling this tight to the block at the same time so then it helps you keep from getting the gap in here and the ring popping out and going on so we're going to use this one here that's a fixed circle and then just pull the just push it through so i need to lube it so i'm going to take it back off here before i shove it all the way through the guy that was originally going to build this you want to do this himself so the machine shop hung the pistons on the rods and they don't they put the rings on here so i think i might pop a couple of these rings off and put it in here just to see what the ring gap is going to be to make sure we're not going to have any any problems so i'll probably pop this top one off we'll just measure it and see we're going to put it down in the cylinder here so you just put it in and twist it then you can use a little tool here so we put the top ring in here you can use a couple different things you can put the piston in here upside down so because you have the second ring still on here you could put it in like so push it down until it stopped to get your ring straight so you can measure your end gap or to make a tool that you can adjust it for your bore size just snug it down and then you can come in here and you can push your your ring down to um because you want to have it straight and get accurate measurement so now we got to push down we're going to see what our in-gap is here and see if we need to adjust it so you see the filler gauge all right so we got 15 thousands of ring gap which i think it'll work good for this so if you take the bore size so this is a 30 over if you do 40 30 and you times it by do point zero zero four zero for like more of a stock application it's like fifteen sixteen thousands of ring gap so being that this is just a naturally aspirated it's gonna have aluminum heads on it so dissipate some of the heat up here in the combustion so i think 15 thousandths and the ring gap is going to work good so i'm going to put this ring back on assume that all the other ones are the same measurement that they're relatively close pop this ring back out just rotate it pop it up and then when you put these rings on everybody's got their own their own way of marking them but normally the mark goes to the top but you can look at it the top ring is normally straight and then the second ring is going to have sometimes the second ring has a bevel this one doesn't have a bevel bevel on it should have some sort of marking see how it has a dot right there the dog goes to the top keep that keep that in mind so we'll put this one back on mark to the top so now we're going to install this piston here number one piston and then we're going to leave the bearing dry because we want to check check the the first one here with the plastic gauge again when i put the rings in you gotta stagger them because if you line them all up obviously you're gonna have a compression compression leak it'll have compression or just be super low because you know you got 15 thousands or so on each ring so it's going to blow by so what i normally do is i normally put the top ring all the way at the bottom and i put the second ring on the top and then on the oil rings here they have so you see where it comes together right here on the little expander and then it has a little spacer ring right there so there's a gap right there and then the other gap oh that one's going to be there but so we're lined up with the wrist pin and then line this one up with the other wrist pin squeeze up here but that doesn't really matter so they're all staggered so they're all 90 degrees from each other and then top bottom are 180 we're gonna have it like so so now when we put this in here we're going to add some assembly loop to it so i'm just going to take the same same assembly loop and being that we're putting it into the cylinder we'll put it over there so if it leaks then it gets onto the witcher what you're trying to put it on anyways go around here and we're going to rub it in if you start at the bottom of the piston it's going to suck it up to the ring anyways we're going to coat it all the way around then remember dog goes to the front and then the rod it's kind of hard to tell but you can see where the it's got a little gap on this side and not on this side so these were the the two rods are going to rub together and this is where it goes up in the radius of the crank so that's going to be to the front and the next one number two is going to be flipped so it'll be the back side of the of the rod throw set it in here easily because we've got to collapse them to get them started so now to get it started see the skirt comes through the bottom that'll help locate line everything up and like i said this is tapered so as you bring it down it's going to suck it to the block so the only time you want to beat on your pistons but you don't really want to beat on them i normally use the butt of a mallet and you got to hold the rod as you as you bring it down so it doesn't bounce around and hit everything so you guide your guide your rod make sure you get the throw throw the crank all the way at the bottom so right rod's gonna play pikaboo here so hold the rod so it doesn't bounce around and just bring it down and then once you get the piston all the way in get your installer out of the way and you don't want to wipe this off because you want a lube for the next one so set it somewhere that it's not going to get all filthy then now that the piston is in i normally just grab both sides of the rod and then push it down so you line it line it up it's going to come down see it goes down tight so now you can rotate the engine around so we can put our little plastic gauge on here and it'll sit and we'll put a cap on and we'll check it and you can see how the bearings even the rods although we oversee a little gap in there how the bearing is away from the radius and it's all the way on this side so tell you that the rod is indexed the right way it's on upside down because if this was up tight to the radius it would eat the it would eat the bearing it would wind up catching it and spinning the rod bearing so now we're gonna get our plastic gauge wipe off my hands here get a little plastic gauge in there then the two locks go to the same side so we'll put our cap on here then we want to put our assembly lube on the nut on the threads so we can get our accurate torque now we're going to torque our rod bolt these only get torqued to 40 foot pounds or just a stock stock bolt nothing crazy so we're going to evenly torque them first i gotta i gotta i gotta set the torque wrench first to 40 foot pounds hold on hold on all right it's a 40 foot bounce so you want to do them evenly but evenly to the point that gives a consistent throw so it torques accurate we've got a torque now we're gonna take it back apart see see what we got it's a little harder to get the the caps off because it's got like a tapered it holds really tight on the bolt so you kind of got to pop it up on these little little lips right here because if you beat it the bolt down you push on the plastic gauge you know mess up your reading so you kind of got to pull the cap up so i'm going to try to come pop this pop this cap up careful not to not to hit anything you can see on this one i don't know if you could tell on the on the camera but so it squished past wider than the 1000s so pretty much i mean probably like a half a thousandths of oil clearance in there so it's too tight and being that this is a new crank so these are standard standard bearings so what it looks like i'm going to put all the pistons in it and then i'm going to check them individually but it looks like what i'm gonna have to do is get a thousands undersized rod bearing so then i would have roughly thousands of half to two thousands of oil clearance in there which is more more what it should be i'm just gonna put the rest of the pistons in it so i can check check them all make sure the machine shop actually size these all the same we'll put the rest of them in right now that's what we're gonna do so now we've got the shore block all assembled to get all the rods in it now we're going to check the the clearance in between the rods here make sure that we have enough i mean it looks good you can see that they move but we're going to just double check with the feeler gauge so it's pretty sure we should be around like 8 to 12 000 somewhere in there so i'll say if they all have 10 it's good to go so yeah we got plenty plenty of room so now we're going to check we want to double check our crankshaft thrust we want to make sure we have enough um thrust in there pretty much the whole point behind checking all the clearance is just to make sure you have enough room for oil to get in there and keep everything lubricated so we're going to set up a we've got a dial indicator we're going to set up on the front here on the snout so now we got our little dial indicator set up so we're going to kick the crank all the way forward so it's going to go on the on the cap here and we're just going to we're going to kick it all the way forward and then we're gonna set our little dial indicator to zero like so and then we'll pry it the other way and see what we got so it looks like we got um three and a half thousandths it looks good good thrust clearance so now we are going to flip it over there we have it so you get all the pistons in it all the dots to the front get them all all good to go we're good to go so you see our crankshaft after new crankshaft didn't come with the keyways and we don't have the old the old one so we're gonna put the cam in it but we can't really put the sprocket on you can't put it all together because i can't get the keyway in there with a sprocket on there but we got it on top dead center so when we get the keyway you see a little a little dot is to the top but we're just gonna put the cam in here we got this bazooka tube camshaft i guess interesting shipping device see what we got in here hey there's a cam in here there's all kinds of stuff in here what's this hello we're gonna use the same assembly lube that we used on the rest of the on all the bearings and everything so we're just gonna concentrate we'll put a little bit on the lobes but we pretty much want to concentrate on the on the journals so we'll just draw a line then let's go a little bit heavier on the on the rear one because it's getting shorted the whole way through get some on there we'll get a coat we'll just mix it in just gonna slowly slowly and carefully work it in there so how do you know that you're working it in there carefully and not incorrectly just put in slow and gently no using hammers so now we can't not enough to reach so it's going to use our sprocket and being that we have the the little keyway here or the the lineup pin we'll just use the pin and a bolt hold it on there and then we've got something to hold on to actually a little more there we go you got something hold on to you can put the cam the rest of the way in just like so you can see lined up but we got to wait until we get the keyway before we finish this so we're just going to go and stop there finishing up on part two hope you guys enjoyed the video the master mechanic is not good with outros there's two part two's coming that comes after one yep that's generally what comes after one is two two two's coming next so what you have to do is hit subscribe button so you know stay tuned for number two and you know when it comes because two is always after one unless you count backwards but we're not doing that we're going out nope we're going to on that note hit the like button down below if it was helpful and if you enjoyed this video right here that's a good one comment in the comments tell me what's going on tell us what we did wrong no vacuum sealed dust free engine building room next time we'll build our ls in the backyard in the mud 1000 horsepower let's do it come on stay tuned now see you guys next time

Channel: ZHP Garage

Views: 215,436

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, 350, 350 SBC, 350 small block Chevy, Full build, Part 1, Classic, Start to finish, 383, 383 stroker, Small block, SBC, Engine, Engine build, Step by step

Id: XsOUXrxTfo0

Length: 28min 9sec (1689 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2021