Ok, I have an opportunity to pick up some aluminum heads for a really great price. They are 210cc Runners, 64cc Combustion Chamber, 2.02 Intake Valves/1.60 Exhaust Valves. Too much for the motor?? I wanna check with youz guys before I dive into those. The price is around 600 bucks complete with valves, springs, rocker studs & guide plates. They're set up for hydraulic flat tappet cam shafts with a max lift .600. Would these fall in line with the 268XE comp cam?
Now you're talkin! You
could go with a bigger cam. Usually the heads are what limits the cam, but since you have what sounds like a great set of heads, I think you could cam it up a bit. Or not.
Believe it or not, my YouTube feed just suggested this video for me this morning.
https://youtu.be/-XjDq2DcZk0 That's basically your build, but jacked up a couple notches.
I would definitely use full roller rockers. Even with my moderately built big block, I tried to just run roller tips, and broke a stud off in the first thousand miles. All 16 rockers were galled and purple from the friction. It was ridiculous. I'll never do that again.
New pushrods are worth the cost. Just get em.
High
pressure oil pumps are the enemy, especially with hydraulic lifters.
High
volume oil pumps are your friend. Others may disagree.
A stock fuel pump will work just fine.
Your distributor will be limited by the intake. Notice in the video at 2:26 he says it has a standard HEI. But then when you look at it, it's an MSD. You don't really need a super duper maximum flash whatnot ignition system. You just need something consistent, that advances the way it's supposed to, and proper spark plugs. In my personal opinion, MSD distributors get way more credit than they should. I won't use them again. The last one I had, I put about 6,000 miles on it, and when I took it out and looked at it, the weights were worn, and the thrust washers on the shaft were worn and galled. It had way too much end play, and I've used nothing but full synthetic oil since after the break-in, and I change the oil about every 1,000 miles.
My favorite is the Crane Cams 1000-1501 Pro Curve Billet. It's easy as pie to set up, and it has a small cap. The drawback, is that it requires an ignition system, as it isn't a self contained HEI. The other drawback, is that Crane almost went under a while back, and a lot of these good parts are disappearing.
I used a Jacobs ignition box for a while, but had two of them go bad within about 6,000 miles. I found a used Crane ignition with a dial rev limiter on eBay, and it works great.
All this talk makes me want to build another engine.
