On a stock body I use the rocker as a reference. bottom of the rocker/pinch weld. Engine/trans will be 3 degrees tailshaft down on normal mounts from the rocker. Do not use the carb flange unless you have confirmed it to be square with the pan rail. Pan rail, bell housing or block front machined surfaces. Use a decent digital protractor.

if the motor is all assembled you can use your balancer to get the angle as well.

One more thing. Many years ago I was hanging out at a friend's dad's shop. Guy pulls in with a boat with a Cadillac engine. Something wasn't right and he wasn't sure what it was. Immediately, I saw the issue, the intake was on backwards. You might have that issue here...

have you checked to see if the driveshaft lines up with the differential ???

if that's a victor intake then it won't have any "tilt" towards the front at the carb pad. engines usually set a few degrees down in the back and most manifolds have a 3-4 degree tilt down towards the front of the carb pad. your engine/trans are probably ok. you may want to have a very careful look at the intake to see if there is a front and back but i don't think it has this. and, looking at a edelbrock catalog it looks like most of those race intakes don't have any angle cast into them.

No driveshaft in the car yet. I need to get it downjacked, take the measurements and order a new shaft. Something I didn't mention before was when the engine was finally in the K frame and the trans bolted up the tail shaft was off center. Additionally the right side of the engine was about a 1/4 inch lower than the left.
Intake is a Trickflow. I don't know if it can be installed backwards or not.
I got a cheep angle guage from Home Depot today. Its reading 4 degrees tilt on the engine and the same at the trans. A better digital gauge should be here tomorrow

the engine/trans are supposed to have a 3-4 degree tilt towards the rear. a 3-4 degree tilt towards the front of the engine at the carb pad corrects that and most intakes have that carb angle designed into them. edelbrocks race intakes don't have carb angle. the circle track guys used have angled spacers they would put under carbs to correct angularity. edelbrock probably designs their intakes this way to avoid distribution issues. you have fuel injection so maybe it's not an issue at all. the left to right angle can be corrected by simply moving the engine around on the k-frame mounts; i've done this. the engine/trans isn't designed to sit in the centerline of the chassis. early b-bodies have the engine off to right and a little angled.

I never knew that about intakes. Maybe this engine is within limits on the aft tilt. It just "looked" out of kilter. The engine alignment (side to side) issue is fixed. I did just what you said but I had to loosen the passenger side mount to make things right. Everything is bolted up and torqued down now. The last thing is to confirm engine tilt with the digital angle gauge.

the transmission needs to be shifted towards the passenger side of the tunnel to allow for shifter linkage. manual or automatic, column or floor shifter.

see if you can find a newer edelbrock catalog or maybe the info is online. it will explain everything about the manifold dimensions. as an example; a 6pak intake has the back of the rear carb pad about an inch higher than the front of the front carb pad. that's going to figure about 3-4 degrees. something else to do when the car is on the floor put a 3/8" spacer under the back of the injection unit (front of injection unit will sit on the manifold) and then check with a level.

On the OPs pic you can see that the plane of the carb base is pretty close to parallel
to his VCs.

On the Hemis pic the carb base is not aligned with the VC.
So apparently, either the OPs intake has no correction for engine tilt
or possibly it is on backwards??

Joe

Received digital angle gauge & level today. Looks like the engine does not have an excessive aft tilt. I did measurements across the entire engine. The more forward the measurement the lesser degree of tilt. For example at the water neck housing 2.5, degrees aft tilt, top of carb 3.1, back of engine by oil pressure sender 2.9, trans pan 3.3, and aft tail shaft 3.5. I would like to thank everyone who commented. I appreciate your input.BTW I'm going to look into the possibility of intake manifold being on backwards. I always thought they could only go on one way.
Frank

i don't think there is a front or back on that intake. edelbrock states zero degree carb pad angle so what difference would it make? there aren't any vacuum or water port points for reference. can you imagine how screwed up that would be with a 4150 style carb with the driveline in it's correct location (3 degrees down toward the rear is normal)? if you had a car that could produce any kind of g-force fuel would slosh out the primary boosters and starve secondary. design float level would be screwed up. but, there are tapered carb spacers out there or one could be simply made from a spacer if someone had access to a mill.

Most intakes are almost impossible to put on backwards. Not that they cant bolt to the heads it is all the other obvious that should clue you what way it goes. Coil mounting, vacuum ports, Logos, lettering just to name a few.

I've built lots and lots of strange motor/car body combinations over the years, and I can tell you without a doubt that having a level motor is a great goal, but not always achievable. I can also tell you that the level can be off quite a bit and not cause any issues. Some vehicles are actually built with the motors set at odd angles on purpose, they were designed so the motor was pretty level when the vehicle was operating at very strange angles.

Fuel injection makes the level motor a lot less important then the old carbs required, but even the old carbs were not as level dependent as some would want you to believe. Gene

the problem with using a tapered carb spacer is that it does not allow the retaining fasteners for the carb to apply even pressure on the carb's ears, thus increasing the chance of the ears to break or crack.
this is because the threads are machined perpendicular to the carb mounting point.
the only way for a tapered spacer to be used properly, would be to machine tapered washers that would index correctly to the base fasteners so the retainers would apply uniform clamping pressure on the ears.