Well, I got the engine put together. I decided to just leave it stock so I could sell all of the junk in the garage and keep some useful stuff, instead fo selling the useful stuff and being stuck with some old crap cylinder heads, an old cast-iron intake, and an old 2-bbl carb. No, it didn't actually take me several months to put it back together, but I figured I'd go ahead and post an update for the benefit of both people who look at my journal. :) Oh, wanna buy an '80 Caprice 2-dr?

Also, comments are disabled on future car posts. It seems that anonymous cowards, who are below my view threshold, BTW, feel compelled to post uninformedly on my car journal entries. Like the idiot who claimed that lower compression raises power somehow. That moron says the exact same engine made more power with less compression in '71 than '70, but then goes on to explain that the cam and head design also changed. Huh. Imagine that. I wonder if the cam, head design, and carb had anything to do with the power increase? I wonder why the higher-compression LS-6 454 (the *real* 454) made more power than both of the LS-5's put together?

Anyway, coments are disabled since it's mostly just idiots commenting anyway. I don't much care what uninformed idiots have to say, and non-idiots can find other ways. Maybe one day I'll subscribe, and limit posting to friends. Maybe.

Well, I guess it's not good to have stuff inside of the cylinders on your typical small block Chevy engine. My car started making a knocking noise a week or so ago, but the valvetrain was fine. So, since I was planning to change the cylinder heads, intake, carb and cam anyway, I pulled it apart. In #1 and #4, there were some cast zinc (also known as pot metal) pieces, such as may have been on a carbueretor. Well, the carb's not missing any pieces, and nothing else is made of that material (the air cleaner's stamped steel, and the heads + intake are cast iron). My best guess is that the previous owner of the car this engine came out (80K mile '71 Chevelle) of dropped something in there, and it just recently broke free of whatever crap was holding it in place. The ports on the intake are comicly small, so this sounds reasonable to me.

Eh, nothing was damaged aside from the little chinks in the pistons (which aren't bad). The new heads (which I gasket matched and polished using Standard Abrasives' really nice kit) have bigger ports and a 58cc chamber rather than the 76cc stock combustion chamber, which should result in much more fun than the stock 8.5:1 compression ratio was giving me - this oughtta put me at about 10.5 or 10.7:1 if I'm getting the swept volume right. The small 4bbl carb works better than the stock 2bbl, the aluminum intake will be lighter and flow better than the cast-iron dualplane, and the mild cam is *way* better than the 1971 smogger engine cam. The engine was originally rated at like 170HP (307 cid / 5.1L), I'm hoping for 280-300 with a good torque curve this time, since the car's an '80 caprice "sport coupe" that still weighs a lot and has bad gears.

Anyone have a 7.5" chevy rear with something like a 3.08 ratio that they wanna get rid of? :)

I like old cars. They're easy to work on, easy to get parts for (usually), and can be made fairly fuel efficient with some simple attention to detail. I've had several cars that make more power than modern SUVs *and* get better mileage - and were more capable off-road vehicles (even though they're cars).

Having more mass than other cars on the road is helpful when some drunken/distracted boob in a small car drifts into your lane, too. Yay momentum and conservation of energy. :)

Some day I'll have to learn why people are so stupid. I mean, why would someone spend several thousand dollars and several years of their life to get a half-arsed MIS degree when they could've actually gotten a *real* CS degree? I can't understand why someone would choose MIS over, say, just majoring in business and taking a couple of programming classes at a community college. At least then they wouldn't confuse people who don't know any better.

"Hey look at this guy, he's got an MIS degree. Must be just as educated as someone with a CS degree". Degrees are generally pointless anyway, but MIS? Sigh.

In general, if something sounds like the name was made up to make it sound more impressive ("Management Information Systems", "Sanitation Engineer") or has "applied" stuck onto it ("Applied Mathematics", "Applied Computer Science"), it's probably not impressive at all, and should be avoided.