wasote=Transman]
The first 440 build I ever did 23 years ago, I walked into a local machine shop with a disassembled long block and a magazine article for a hi po 440 build, probably similar to the ones being talked about here. upper 9's to 1, big valves, some porting, MP cam etc.
The machine shop took a pen and x'd out everything they said would be a disaster in a 4x4 truck, I spent quite a bit of cash, took their advice, and basically ended up with a stock 8:1 motor .030 bigger than I took apart. Should of gone elsewhere, that shop is long out of business now.
i got back into the mopar stuff in 1985 after a 10yr lull. went thru about the same thing in 1985. not sure anything has gotten better.
That skill of selecting a combination comes from racing/dyno work.
So the question should be when you walk in to a machine shop and ask them for advice on selecting a package - how much successful racing have they done and do they have a dyno. No racing experience or dyno, leave unless you know what you want done and don’t allow them to give you anything you didn’t ask for.
I think back then, compression seemed to be a dirty word. Locally the choice of machine work had a lot of rumor in it and people told me the racer shops were just good at blowing stuff up or the place I went to that was known as a place to get accurate machine work done. Their machine was good, they just didnt want to venture off of stock specs. They said if I went with 6 pack pistons it would ping on pump gas, they freaked out when I ported the heads with the mp template, and told me the heads would crack and leak. They wouldnt put 2.14 valves in , said the valves would hit the pistons. In the end the motor went together and still runs today, was just never at the potential it could have been. Im playing with the idea of putting Estreet heads on it and dropping 10cc off the chambers. [/quote]
Sorry, I made it sound easier than it is - it depends on locality, etc. Here in my area going back the last 50 + years we had an abundance of good shops and of course some not so good but those were few. And we had a lot of successful racers in the area so we all fed the good machine shops and didn’t have to ask any questions.
Being where you are I would imagine you don’t have many shops to choose from so that makes things much more difficult for you.
Used to be a guy that would come across the border from Windsor with his car, switched the motor for a cleaned up junk yard motor and he would leave his motor to be built. Would come back another day and do the switch again. All because he got stung several times in Windsor.
