I bought the crank kit mail order and had the block machined locally. The crank is a cast unit turned 10-10. The block was bored .030 over, decked and align-honed. I did the blueprinting along with the assembly myself. The block has ARP main studs installed without a thread locking compound per their instructions. The pistons are TRW forged with a four valve relief flat top. I apologize for the poor quality on the piston pics. The intake manifold in the mockup shot is an Edelbrock Torker II. The intake is one of the areas where I have quite a bit of tuning and experimenting planned, so this intake may or may not be my final choice.

Here you can see the various parts I used in the heads including the Manley 2.02 intake and 1.60 exhaust valves. I placed quarters next to the valves for size reference in the first picture here. The retainers and locks are from Pioneer, the springs are Elgin (not pictured). The head gaskets are GM.

The heads are from World Products, notice the tell-tale "W" in the first shot. They are the Sportsman model with 200cc ports. I did a mild pocket porting job on them. Here are several pictures of the heads after the pocket port. In my opinion they turned out very well. I used a Standard Abrasives porting kit with my air and electric die grinders to do the job. I love that polished look of the ports and pockets. Boy, if they only run as good as they look I'll be quite happy! Keep in mind that the only reshaping I did here was the cast part of the valve guides. I mostly concentrated on smoothing the contours. I didn't want to make any expensive mistakes.

I painted the engine to match the car, a light blue metallic. The engine compartment should look pretty good. Once I figure out which intake manifold I want to run I may have it silver hi-temp coated for a nice contrast. Once I find a satisfactory set of headers I may have them coated too. Right now I'm using Flowtech headers which DO NOT fit to my satisfaction.

Click on the images to see the full size view.

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