Picked up a 440 out of a motorhome with 28000 miles on it. Tore it down to the short block to confirm mileage and it appears to be actual. The engine is a smogger and looking at changing cam and some new heads....probably 906s.

Any suggestions or advice on a combination that will work? Motor is going into a 64 Sweptline crew cab so looking for a good daily driver combination.

Thanks,

Unless your 906's are already worked over and fresh, don't bother. The heads that are on it are basically the same and in stock form might actually flow slightly better depending on who you ask. For sure they will have hardened seats which the 906 heads won't have.

Being a smog engine the actual compression ratio will be hard pressed to approach 8:1 likely 7.8-7.9:1 so chose your cam accordingly.

Kevin

The heads on that engine should be 452s. They are better for your purposes than 906s. For one, they are easier to home port, according to the experts. For another, they have induction hardened valve seats.
You should be aware that all bigblock heads flowed within a good valve job of each other from the 915s in 1967 to the 452s.
If you are going to pay someone else to do heads for you, get a solid quote first, then look at 440Source's Stealth heads. They flow out of the box better than 90% of all home port jobs.

R.

You want a good daily driver combo? Like suggested, use the 452 heads. With only 28k miles, they should be in very nice shape still. I have heard some motorhomes got the funky ones with the extra cooling ports and the special water pump housing. Guess this is not what you have...

For your combo, I would just keep the engine stock. With a compression around 7.8:1, you don't want to cam it. And IMO it's not worth changing out the stock cam in your case. Run the stock intake, pre-smogger thermoquad which your 76 motorhome engine might have, recurve the distributor and maybe switch to a set of hp manifolds. I would leave the heated crossover hooked up, it helps with driveability and gets the choke to open a lot quicker. Been there, done that, daily drove a stock 76 440 w/ a thermoquad for years in my satellite. It ran great, sounded good with dual exhaust and got decent fuel mileage around town with 3.55 gears. Do yourself a favor however and invest some time into tuning the carb and distributor.

use a set of 915 closed chamber heads to bring up the compression,use a .027 cometic head gasket and a wiplash cam and it will go fast