The Best 350 Chevy Block to Build

if you if you're trying to buy an early small block engine a lot of the very early engines from the 70s are pretty clapped out and kind of wasted nowadays I want to talk to you about the block that you should be looking for these are readily available and they are a very good quality block this engine was only made for about five or six years it was made from 1996 all the way up to about 2002 in the trucks and they had Marine Engines also this is the 5.7 liter vortec engine there's some features on this block that are really excellent for building a street rod and I'm going to talk about those so the last three digits of the casting number on the Block that you're looking for is an 880. this is an 880 casting and there's a couple of things that are pretty obvious about it one of the things you'll notice is in the back it has a one-piece rear main seal housing the earlier block the the rear cap Incorporated the seal this rear main seal setup now they actually use this rear main seal setup on the TBI engines too so it would have been 1986 and up in 96 they went to the vortex style motor some of the TBI Motors are usable or something that you should be looking for but I'm going to show you there was a couple of differences on the TBI engines some of the TBI engines were not machined for the roller cam setup if you can what you want to do is try to get the roller cam block all the vortex were roller cam blocks and you know I think I've told you before I'm at the point now where I'm done with flat tappets I just I'm not going to use them anymore even if I have an early block I'm going to put a retrofit roller in they're just so much better and they don't cost that much more anymore so all right so the vortec 8080 casting it's also going to have a windage tray it has the larger tube the oil pump is different has a much larger pickup tube I've already taken the bolts out of this so that the oil pump bolt goes through the windage tray and then there's three main cap bolts that come up it does allow those are Provisions for the windage tray I got the bolt out of this so the oil pump comes out so it's got the bigger updated oil pump another thing that's very common on these is the connecting rods I've already taken a couple of these out this is a powdered metal connecting rod it's different than the earlier forged Rod it is a forged Rod believe it or not a lot of people don't realize that but this is what they call a powdered metal rod the way they manufacture these rods is they take metal powder they grind metal down into very fine iron filings or metal filings and then they compress it together they put it in a press in the shape of the rod and they put a press hit on it and they press it into the shape of the rod and then it goes through multiple stage heat treat process the powder metal rods are actually fairly new on the automotive scene these have only been around since like the early 1980s now I know some of you are thinking God I wasn't even born in the early 1980s or you know a lot of you probably were but in scope of the automotive industry the 80s was relatively recent Ford started out using these in one of their cars they took a chance on it now powdered metal rods have actually gotten kind of a bad rap I've heard negative things about them mainly I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that's because the people that are saying negative things don't really understand powder metal rocks the fact of the matter is is that these powder metal rods are 25 to 30 percent stronger than the earlier Chevy conventionally forged rods that's been proven they can take more horsepower these are very very good rods for a street motor so if you get a set with powdered metal rods and they look different they have a rounded Edge they don't have the balancing pad that square up here they're more rounded and it's just you can tell it's a different style of Rod altogether so powder metal rod is a very good rod it's a cast piston motor we're going to throw the Pistons away we're not going to use those the nice thing about it though is the bell housing bolt pattern the starter mounting the oil filter adapter and housing all of that is the same as the early block so this is going to bolt right into your early Street Rod or whatever you're working on the oil pan is different with the one piece rear main seal so you're gonna have to get the pan that goes with this now a couple things on the front of the engine so there's a couple features on the front of the engine that are different one thing that you'll notice is that there is a machined pad here and there's a couple of bolt holes there's actually a camshaft retaining plate that goes here to retain the roller cam when you do a a cam upgrade on the earlier Chevrolet engines like this one here you'll notice that it doesn't have a machined area and a a provision for the roller cam this isn't this is a late 70s block but it doesn't it's this is designed for a flat tap it so the difference is you have to use a Thrust button in this thing if you're going to put a roller cam in it the 880 block features this machined area for your retaining plate and so you can run a replacement cam that's a factory type roller cam the reason you want to do that is because this is already set up for a roller and the the factory roller replacement cams the performance cams that are designed to run in a factory block are a lot cheaper or less expensive than the retrofit for the earlier blocks so you're going to save a lot of money and and you can still run a performance roller cam in there so it works out pretty good now I talked earlier about the fact that the throttle body injection blocks which were 86 and up it is possible that you can use one of those too it's a different casting number but what you need to look for is you need to look for these holes being drilled and tapped for the plate a lot of the the throttle body engines used a similar type block but they had a flat tapping the other thing is in this Vortex block you can also use a flat tapping cam in it if you want to you don't have to go roller I recommend it but these blocks will take either type of Cam so a lot of the TBI engines had all of the provisions for the the roller cams but they didn't run rollers in a lot of them some of them did have rollers and some of the performance applications but a lot of them did not you want to look for that boss with those tap tools now the other thing is the front cover this is a marine engine that we're working on here and you'll notice that there's a couple of dowel pins here on the front those dowel pins are to locate the timing chain cover so this is just your typical small block Chevy timing chain cover it's the same cover they've used on these things for 50 years so since this is a marine engine even though it's a Vortec they did use and those pins right there are to locate and Center that seal so they locate the cover this is the early style cover now the vortec a lot of them came with a plastic timing cover that had a sensor in it reluctor wheel that you'll see on the front of the engine and it goes right there in front of that gear and what it was is the plastic cover went on here and there was a crank position sensor in the cover that actually picked this up and this since it's keyed onto the crank this would tell the computer where top dead center was right it's basically a crank trigger you don't have to run that if you're going to run a carburetor you're going to run some kind of fuel system you could just take that off and leave it out now if you're going to run the throttle the the Vortec fuel injection and use the sensor down here with the plastic cover you have to make dang sure that this thing is on here the engine is not going to start but you can just take it off for Hot Rod purposes you don't even have to put that back on if you are going to run the front cover now if you get an engine with a plastic front cover on it what you'll notice is when you take the cover off these two dowel pins are not going to be here there's not going to be anything in these holes because the plastic cover has those dowels built into it and they just protrude into the block right out of the cover well if you have a plastic cover and you want to update your block or you want to use an earlier style timing cover the steel one all you got to do is get these dowel pins and tap them in the bolt pattern is exactly the same on the front of the motor the only difference is the vortex had no dowel pins the non-vortex or the ones without the plastic cover you just put the dowels in and boom you run your cover from 1970 on there you're on your aluminum performance cover or whatever that's the nice thing about this block very interchangeable now this particular block is a four bolt main most of the Marine engines were now the crankshaft is different it's a one piece rear main seal crank so it is definitely a different crank most of the cranks in fact all of the cranks that they made in these were nodular iron they weren't the early cheapy like 442 casting cast iron cranks that the old Chevys have this is a nodular iron crank and it is much stronger than the earlier Chevy cast cranks it is a cast crank but these can take a lot of punishment I've seen these take six 700 horsepower and live for a long time so these are good crankshafts even though they're not forged now if you're going to do some kind of boost or something then you probably want to forge it now the one other thing you need to look for and I've got exactly the same block on the on the floor here that I just built so I want to show you something this is a another 880 block that we just put together you want to look for these bosses here now these are what take the roller cam provision so the roller lifters go in here over each set of lifter bores you have one of these little crow's feet thing and it sits over the lifters and what that does is the lifters sit inside this and it keeps the lifter body from rotating holds the roller in line so you're going to see this in there and you're also going to see this spider assembly this has three holes in it here in it bolts up just like that so you'll see when you pull the intake off if you see this sheet metal spider assembly in here and one of these over each set of lifters you have a roller cam block but even if it's a TBI motor guys it's not going to have this assembly in it it'll have flat tappets just like the early Chevy but what you want to do in addition to looking for the machined areas up here for the retaining plate you want to look at these bosses here and make sure they are drilled and tapped because if they are then that block is set up for a a roller cam so that's what you're looking for if you're looking for a TBI motor and you want to convert it to Roller

Channel: Myvintageiron7512

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Keywords: How to rebuild a 350 Chevy, 350 Chevy, 5.7 Liter Chevy, Turbo, S-10 V8 swap, LS swap, Boost, Complete Engine rebuild, Ford, Chevy, GM, GMC, Dodge, Mopar, Toyota, TRD, Chevy Hot Rod, Land Rover, Big Block Chevy, 327, 383, 440, 454, 496, hemi, 396, 427, Ford FE, 5.9 Liter Cummings, 6.4 Hemi, Honda

Id: IlRl407HL4M

Length: 10min 26sec (626 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 16 2023