How To Build a Chevy 383 Stroker - Part 1: Block & Crank

hey gang at Shannon and today what we're going to try to attempt to do is build a 383 Chevy small-block stroker motor using a box of old parts as you can see here we have the old block that's been machined kind of rough we've got the old tin we've got a box of parts we've got the old heads and we've got an old print and what we're going to do is we're going to start by cleaning the block making sure that everything is cleaned out and ready to assemble okay what we're doing here is we're running a tap a 3/8 tap through our three it's full it's a very good idea to run a tap through all of your holes on the block just to make sure all the crap and rust and leftover cleaning garbage is cleaned out so you don't have any problems later on down the road so here is our used crank that we got with our basket of parts supposedly this thing was polished and obviously you can tell you can feel the grooves just like on an older record you can feel the grows with your thumb usually you can barely feel them with your thumbnail but this one you can feel with your thumb and you can tell that the main journals are a little rough so what we're going to do is we're just going to hit this with some scotch brite clean it up and we're going to plastic age it to make sure it's okay to go so here you see we have a scat brand steel crankshaft and by looking at the numbers on the end looked up the numbers find out this is for a 350 block with a long stroke making it a 3 d3 as you can see by the pitting on the journals there's no way that this thing only has ten hours on it as we were told by the dirtbag who sold us this engine something you'll notice on these bearings with supposedly only 10 hours on them is when you look at the back at the stamping you'll see that it actually is stamped 0:01 which means it's made for a crankshaft that has been ground down one thousandths of an inch so if these are the old bearings supposedly hopefully the new bearings that are thousands under / depending on how you look at it will fit if these were standard bearings you would see the letters STD and no they don't stand for what you think they do at just short for standard so as you can see these main bearings that we were supplied with our marked at 1000 under or over depending on which way you look at it which means hopefully our main our crank has been turned down on the mains to fit we'll check that later with plastic age the rear main bearings are pretty obvious on which one goes in the back of the block the rest of the bearings here if you forget which way they go just remember to line up the oil holes with the bearings and on the block you put your bearings in make sure you have the right side so the oil holes line up start with the alignment dial there push it in like so now if you have the bearing pushed in you can line it up make sure it's all the way down by lightly tapping on till it bottoms out on the steel like that do not curve in this way but you can keep it out or try and just keep it flat so after you've done what you can with the crank lube up your main bearings with a little assembly Lube just make sure you smear those good stay cover well so very carefully drop your crank in nice and even make sure it spins fairly easy and we're going to connect some end rods on here and some Pistons and check the clearances now luckily for us whoever tore this into the part actually took the time to stamp the main caps here's a number two and so we know which order they go in sometimes these little stamps here you'll see the arrow actually points towards the front of the motor sometimes you'll see knobs on there that have one two or three four knobs on there sometimes they're stamped and numbered and sometimes you're just on your own but look very closely try and find the number stamped on everything and lay them out in order okay what we've done is we've put two main bearing caps on the crankshaft on each end to hold the crankshaft in and we've put in one piston without the rings we cleaned and oil two cylinders first and we just hung one rod on here so we can check our clearances and as you see it bolts in but since this is a stroker cranker as we spin it around it's going to get really close on that side and as it comes up here towards the block you can see the tolerance is not quite what we want it to be so what we're going to do is we're going to hang all these rods mark them and clearance it for our stroker crank that extra quarter-inch makes a big difference okay we are going to hang our pistons and rods on the crank temporarily so you can check the clearance and Mark the block so we can clearance the Block on the stroker crank so always start with a little bit of brake cleaner on the rag and wipe out the cylinder you get the idea after you clean the cylinder use a little bit of engine oil a little bit of engine oil on the rag and make sure you get the cylinder clean and lubed up with some oil with just a film of oil that keeps you from scratching up your nice newly machined cylinders and just as a side note you may want to invest in one of these little babies this is a socket specifically designed to fit on your crankshaft that will keep the key from getting rounded off and you don't want that and it just makes it so much easier to turn so you can see our stroker crank it inside the block but just barely so what we want to do is we want to clearance this block a little bit to allow room for not necessarily rod stretch like people like to talk about but keep in mind that anytime something gets hot it expands so if the rod gets hot and expands a couple thousands and the block gets hot and expands and grows a couple thousands your 3000 s clearance here now just became 1,000 so just for an extra safety measure we're going to mark these spots on the block and just hit them a little lightly with a die grinder you can see where we've clearance the block for our rod throws just so you don't get anything hung up in there so nothing gets out of whack make sure you kind of round off your corners you don't want any sharp corners on a cast iron block because it cracks easier that way you can see that I put some tape over the oil holes on the main journals just for having protection to keep the metal out now we're still going to have to hose down this whole block blow it boil it dry it and then we can assemble it okay the first thing we're going to do with our block after it's nice and clean and ready to be assemble is we install our main bearings here and if you're not sure which piece goes into the block you see little oil passages there match those up with oil passages on your main bearing that's how you know which half goes at the ball which goes at the top line those up alignment ears and make sure they are pressed in flat and level on each side after you press in your main bearings you can give it a little tap even with the hammer just to make sure it's flush on both sides so less chance of it spinning getting out of whack all right after we get our main bearings in we're going to grab our nice new tube of motor assembly grease and lube up our main bearings of course after you do a couple hundred motors tube ends up looking like this and it's time to get a new one on your main bearings you just need a little bit of assembly Lube like so make sure you spread it nice and even with your finger and that one's ready to go it's very important when you install your crank all the journals are clean that still has lube on it from when we test fit it earlier and make sure you drop it in straight make sure everything smooth clothes and turns smoothly just like so don't want to damage the crank okay we've got most of our main caps in now we just need to put our last one in if you wondering which way they go match up the little ear on the bearing with it here on the half that's in the block this one is stamped number two also has a little arrow pointing forward so that should tell us where we're going we've got our white assembly lube on here a couple drops of engine oil on the threads give it a little tap there bolt started zip it down with a 3/8 gun and then using our cheat sheet we see that we need to torque it to 70 foot-pounds we get our trusty torque wrench set at 70 foot-pounds wait for that big click right there that tells us where it's out your foot pans now we know that everything all the main caps are on there torque down now we can use our plasti gauge and check our mains and make sure the bearings are going to fit right okay this little piece of spooge on our crank is called plastic gauge comes in paper like this and it's basically like a dental floss wax-covered dental floss what it does is it goes on our main journal and then we put on our main cap we're going to tighten it down and it will compress that and we're going to measure it to see what kind of clearance we have on our main bearings oK we've installed our main cap and we torque it down now we're going to take it back off okay we're going to remove our main cap okay here's our little plastic gauge food stain after we've taken the main bearing cap back off and what we do is we put our little plastic age gauge next to it and we measure it and how much that compresses and squashes out tells us how many thousands of an inch we have clearance on our bearings and ideally we want this to be between the largest setting and the smallest setting as you can see it's pretty much just to the max so we're going to clearance it just a little bit okay in order to loosen up those bearing a little bit and get a couple just a half a thousands more clearance I'm going to make sure the bearing is clean wipe down use brand new piece of scratch Brite I know it's called scotch brite but scotch brite is trademarked and scratch brite sounds funnier and what we're going to do is we're going to do nice even strokes all the way into ends on our bearing we're going to count about 30 to 50 strokes just to clearance that and we're going to plastic age again check it until we have the proper clearance okay make sure you get the assembly lube and grease off the crank get the old plastic age off with your thumb nail make sure it's all clean before you put the new plastic age on and check it again put your new piece of plastic age on your main journal on your crank make sure it's in the middle at the top and in the middle left to right to get a good even compression and to check your clearance make sure you have the correct number main bearing cap this is the number to make sure your arrow is pointed forward make sure that your tab lines up with the tab on the block and install it make sure you use just a couple drops of engine oil on your main bearing cap bolts before you put them in when you line them up and install them anytime I put any bolts in I always back thread them until you hear that click and then thread them forward 99.999% of the time that keeps you from cross threading or stripping your bolts make sure you tighten up your bolts evenly left and right you don't want to just crank it down on one side you want to go back and forth evenly and crank it down to the set torque and you'll hear that big click right there then you know it's all torqued down it's even you can take off the cap now and check it remove your main cap bolts I'm going rain cap and we're going to check that little bugger again okay here's your classic age spooge stain again see it's not quite as wide and I put our measuring Duta on there it's just about at the max tolerance so it should be safe to go make sure it's not whiter than this make sure it's not skinnier than the smallest part we'll clean this off with our thumbnail lube it up move on to the next one make sure you do this and repeat this procedure with each main cap because you never know what kind of machine works been done you don't know what kind of crank you got you don't know what kind of shape the bearings are in even if they're new normally if it's a brand new crank brand new bearings everything should match up it should be fine on the first time but you still want to check this with your plastic gauge so you don't regret it later down the road when the crank falls out or starts knocking or you have all kinds other problems something I like to do whenever I torque bolts down for the final time or adjust valves rockers whatever so I like to take my little sharpie and I just like to make a line across here and that lets me know case I forget that I'd have torqued these bolts it takes all the guesswork out of it and you don't lose track of anything here you can see we have a nice pattern on our front main journal with our plastic age as we put our scale on here we can see that it's just a hair inside which means it's in within tolerance which means we do not have to clearance this mean we can just put it together that's the reason why you check every single mane every single rod because they're not all necessarily exactly the same here are a couple of side notes in case you are wondering if you've heard the term to bolt and for bolt main or for bolt block what it refers to are these main bearing caps right here you'll notice there's two bolts holding this main bearing cap if this were a stronger and little better for bolt main these caps this cast part right here would be a little bit wider out to here and it would have smaller bolts like this and you would have four bolts holding this main cap on and that would only be the three middle caps the front and rear main would still be a two bolt also on this you'll notice these tall studs or bolts right here that are sticking out what those are for is this engine came with what is called a windage tray what that does is that keeps the oil from sloshing around and it lines up like that the hole lines up with where the dipstick goes the back hole is going to line up with the oil pump when you put that in but we're not doing that on this engine that's just a little FYI tidbit for you you

Channel: SanDiegoHotRod

Views: 891,754

Keywords: how, to, build, small, chevy, 283, 327, 350, 383, 400, block, stroker, motor, engine, stand, high, performance, hot, rod, car, truck, corvette, corvettes, and, customs, install, crank, crankshaft, shannon, wafford

Id: A3ZAGyvpd9w

Length: 18min 23sec (1103 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 17 2013