Build Your First Engine

So the lazy stocker in your car just isn't up to the task of producing the power you need. Maybe it's so far gone that it won't even respond to the most basic hot rodding tricks, such as installing a bigger carb, cam, and headers. Rather than wasting your time beating a dead horse, a change is in order. If this is your first go at it, you may be bewildered by the options arrayed before you. Should you go to a pro with checkbook in hand? How about ordering a crate motor? Maybe you can get by with a simple re-ring and a valve job and save quite a bit of money on machine work and parts. It may seem a bit overwhelming to a first-timer, but to help get you going, we'll take you through the steps we took to turn a junkyard-scrounged Ford small-block into a healthy hot rod engine. In this instance we got by without a major rebuild by determining that the engine was in good enough shape to only need new rings and bearings and a valve job.

The Teardown
Whether for a re-ring or a full rebuild, the first step is to tear down the engine to determine the condition of the parts you'll need to reuse--mainly the block, crank, rods, and cylinder heads, if you intend to rebuild them. A machine shop can do this for you, but you'll save money by doing it yourself. As you disassemble the short-block, make sure to keep all the fasteners and other critical hardware organized and labeled; Ziplock bags are perfect for this. Keep an eye out for obviously damaged components or signs of catastrophic failure (see sidebar) as you disassemble the core.

The Rebuild
After the teardown, you're ready for the machine shop, unless you opt for a down-and-dirty backyard rebuild like we did. We used a flexible bottle-brush hone to clean up the surface of the bores (see "Top 10 Engine-Building Tools" on page 38 for more details on the procedures we used to rebuild this engine). Most machine shops recommend that you bore and hone any used block to the minimum oversize needed to clean up the bores, and almost every time we'd agree with them. However, this particular 5.0L Ford is one case where we wouldn't. Why? Because unlike virtually any other production engine built in the last 30 years, the '85-'92 5.0L H.O. engines came stock with beefy forged TRW pistons. Even that wouldn't be enough to steer us away from a bore and hone if it weren't also for the fact that the late-'80s Ford blocks were cast with a high nickel content that resists bore wear like--well actually, a lot better than--iron.

It's not uncommon to find a 100,000-mile stocker with virtually no bore wear, and amazingly our block's bores exhibited less than 0.001 inch of taper when we checked them with a dial bore gauge. That was enough to convince us to re-ring this engine, saving the cost of new forged pistons (about $400) and a bore and hone ($150-$200 locally). But consider this engine something of an exception, because in most cases, a bore and hone is a necessary part of a rebuild, especially with a high-mileage core. We also rolled the dice by not having our block hot-tanked and Magnafluxed, which saved us the cost of installing new cam bearings but could have revealed if the block was cracked, which is always a possibility with an unknown-condition engine.

However, we did bring the stock cylinder heads to M&R Machine, our favorite local rebuilder, to get a fresh valve job. M&R installed new bronze valve guides, recut the seats on a Serdi valve machine, reground the stems of the stock valves, and decked the heads to clean up the gasket surfaces, bringing the factory E7TE castings back up to snuff for $225.

To freshen up the rest of the bottom end, we ordered a re-ring kit for $135 from Northern Auto Parts, which included a Victor Reinz gasket set, Clevite 77 bearings, and Speed Pro plasma-moly rings. Northern's catalog is filled with rebuild kits for every imaginable engine under the sun, and in addition to carrying a full line of aftermarket speed parts at discount mail-order prices, the company offers numerous upgrades, such as performance cams, forged pistons, and more.

Picking Parts
Speaking of speed parts, choosing from the astonishing array of aftermarket performance parts can be a daunting task to an experienced engine builder, let alone a novice embarking on his first engine project. To simplify the decision, we selected a matched engine package from Holley's Street Avenger series (see sidebar). The beauty of the Street Avenger system is that Holley can supply virtually everything you need to complete your engine except the block. It does this by selecting components from its basket of well-known brand divisions, including Weiand, Lunati, Hooker, NOS, and Earl's, in addition to its own line of Street Avenger carbs, cylinder heads, and Annihilator ignition products. Add to that the fact that the combinations have been selected and dyno-tested by Holley's in-house engineers in conjunction with renowned race engine-builder Keith Dorton, and you've got a surefire combination at a reasonable price.

The Results
We put our engine back together in stages according to the three levels of the Street Avenger system. For our first test, we ran the Ford with the rebuilt stock iron heads, stock cam, and a close approximation of the stock exhaust system: factory 5.0L Mustang tubular headers through a factory H-pipe with cats but no mufflers. We topped off the engine with the Stage I components of the Street Avenger system, a Weiand Stealth dual-plane manifold, and a Holley 670-cfm Street Avenger carb--it's as if we yanked the mill from a Mustang, chucked the factory EFI setup, and bolted on a carburetor. Stage II consisted of a cam and header swap, and for Stage III we upgraded to a set of aluminum cylinder heads with roller-rocker arms (see captions and graphs for results of those tests). Each stage ratcheted up both the performance and the price, as we went from a baseline of 278 hp for $1,290, to 309 hp for a total of $2,150, to 352 hp for a grand total of $3,510. With the Street Avenger system you don't have to spend your wad all at once, but with an array of parts ranging from mild to wild, Holley can meet the needs of the first-time engine builder and beyond.

Holley Street Avenger Engine Systems The concept of offering a matched set of components--such as a cam, a carb, headers, and an intake--isn't new. In fact, it isn't even new to Holley, which has marketed its Systemax kits for several years. Where the new Street Avenger systems differ is in their modular approach to building a performance engine and their availability in several degrees of performance from mild to wild. Holley Street Avenger systems are available for many popular engine families, including small- and big-block Chevys, Ford FEs Windsors and 429s/460s, and Mopar 318/360 and 383/440.

Stage 1
Carburetor (or throttle body for some EFI applications), intake manifold, headers, distributor, ignition box, plug wires, fuel pump, water pump, and other accessories

Stage II
Upgraded camshaft and timing set

Stage III
Aluminum cylinder heads (available for small- and big-block Chevys and small-block Fords)

Tearing It Down
Careful visual inspection of your engine and components during disassembly can provide valuable clues to the condition of your parts and may give you insight into how well the engine was treated in its prior life. Most problems, short of a cracked block or crank, can be remedied by a good machine shop, but be prepared to spend extra time and money on the repairs. After teardown, the block, crank, and heads should be brought to a machine shop to be properly cleaned and magnetic-particle-inspected for cracks before any machine work is attempted. Here are a few things to look out for during disassembly.

* Spun rod or main bearings
* Blue or otherwise discolored connecting rods indicate excessive heat buildup in the bearings
* Large scratches or gouges in the cylinder bores, possibly caused by a butted piston ring
* Broken fasteners or holes that may need to be retapped
* Signs of water in the oil
* External damage to the block from being dropped, especially at the starter boss or bellhousing flangeFor our first test, we ran the Ford with stock iron heads, stock cam, stock factory exhaust, and topped off with the Stage I Street Avenger components: a Weiand Stealth dual-plane manifold and a Holley 670-cfm Street Avenger carb. Result: 278 hp at 5,200 rpm and 315 lb-ft of torque at 4,100 rpm. Total cost: $1,290. That works out to $4.64 per horsepower.

Buy or Build?
Rebuilding an engine represents a considerable investment in time and money. Once you hunt down a core or pull the engine from your car, you've got to tear it down, get it machined, order parts, and put it back together. All that's going to take several weeks at a minimum--and possibly a lot longer--but nothing beats the satisfaction of being able to say you built it yourself. On the other hand, you could simply call one of the many crate-motor specialists, including the performance parts divisions of the Big Three automakers, and have an engine shipped to your door, ready to install. Sounds easy. But what's the real difference in cost and performance?

To give you an example, we recently tested a Ford Racing 345hp 302 crate engine ("Crate Eight," July '01), which was built from a new Ford Explorer short-block and came with aluminum heads and a roller cam with very similar specs to the Lunati cam we used in the buildup featured here. During our initial testing of the Ford crate engine, we ran a slew of carbs across it, one of which was a 670-cfm Holley Avenger similar to the one used in this buildup. With a set of long-tube headers and a high-rise dual-plane intake, the crate engine produced 349 hp at 6,100 rpm. Jobber-priced at $3,000 from Ford, however, the crate engine doesn't come with a carb, an intake, a distributor, or headers, and to use it in just about any other vehicle than a late-model Ford Explorer, you have to get a $179 conversion kit to change the balancer, water pump, oil pan, and timing cover. Adding these additional costs brings the price of the ready-to-run Ford crate engine closer to $4,000. Making almost exactly the same peak power, the engine featured in this article cost $3,510 (see sidebar). That's a pretty big difference in price, but the convenience factor may be worth it.

Other things to consider with crate engines are the warranties that many of them come with, which you certainly won't get if you build it yourself, and the convenience of limited downtime.

Price List Item Source Price*
Stage I
Long-block core Junkyard $100 Re-ring kit Northern Auto 135 Valve job M&R Machine 225 Carburetor Holley 360 Intake Holley 160 Distributor Holley 220 Wires Holley 50 Oil pump Kragen 18 Plugs Kragen 8 Oil & filter Kragen 10 Paint Kragen 4 Subtotal $1,290

Stage II
Cam Lunati $280 Pushrods Lunati 30 Headers Doug's 550 Subtotal $2,150

Stage III
Heads Holley $1,100 Subtract valve job -225 Roller rockers Lunati $300 Head bolts ARP 85 Valve covers Ford 100 Grand Total $3,510

*Prices for Holley Street Avenger components were sourced from a major mail-order catalog and are accurate as of August 10, 2001.

As you tear down your engine for inspection and machining, make sure to keep track of the order of the pistons and the rod and main caps so they don't get mixed up. The rods on many factory engines, including our Ford 5.0L, are marked at the factory, so you don't have to worry about a mix-up. But if they aren't, you can get an inexpensive set of stamping dies to label the rods according to their firing-order location. This set cost five bucks at a swap meet.

Once the fasteners are loosened, the main rod and caps should be broken loose with a rubber mallet or the wooden handle of a hammer, never with metal-to-metal contact. When removing the pistons from the bores, take care not to gouge the surface of the crank with the threads of the rod bolts.

If you opt not to have your block hot-tanked, use oven cleaner instead. It makes an excellent hot tank in a can, working better than any engine degreaser we've tried. Just be careful not to let it get on your skin for long, because it burns! It also washes off easily with water. Once the block is dry, make sure to spray exposed machined surfaces, such as the bores and deck, with WD-40 or another penetrating oil to protect them from flash rusting. This especially goes for a freshly machined block.

Many first-time builders skip degreeing the cam, opting instead to merely stab it in "straight up" by lining up the dots on the timing gear. Degreeing allows you to verify the grind of the cam and identify any gross problems with timing (which are rare). Degreeing is also useful for checking piston-to-valve clearance, as you'll see later on. We degreed both the stock cam and the Lunati roller provided with the Street Avenger system. We were surprised to find how big the stock 5.0L cam was, measuring 208/212 degrees at 0.050-inch lift, with 0.445/0.445-inch lift at the valve with the stock 1.6:1 stamped rockers. With 218/228 degrees of duration at 0.050, the Lunati cam is not radically bigger, but it provides much greater lift--0.536/0.536.

One of the first upgrades most car crafters make to a stock engine is to change to a double-roller timing chain. That's not needed here because the roller-cam 5.0Ls came with a roller chain from the factory. We did buy a new chain, however, for $8.50 at the local Kragen.

Holley warns in the instructions that p-to-v must be checked with the large 2.02-inch intake valves in the Holley Street Avenger heads and the bigger Lunati cam. We rigged up a dial indicator with a set of lightweight checking springs, and using the degree wheel, checked p-to-v clearance. Sure enough, while we had plenty of clearance on the exhaust side, the intakes were tight, with just 0.030-inch clearance without a gasket. Assuming a 0.039-inch-thick head gasket, we might have barely squeaked by with a clearance of about 0.070 inch, but 0.080 is closer to a comfortable minimum.

To illustrate the piston-to-valve clearance, we mocked up the engine the old-fashioned way by putting clay in the valve reliefs. Duration is more critical than lift here, and in general, the intake valves are closest to the piston at 9 to 11 degrees after TDC on the intake stroke, as the piston is falling and the intake is opening; the exhaust valves are closest at 9 to 11 degrees before TDC on the exhaust stroke, as the piston is rising and the exhaust is closing. In this case, the problem wasn't the depth of the notches, it was the radial clearance between the relief and the edge of the oversize valve (arrow).

Since we already had the pistons out of the block for cleaning, it was easy to run a Dremel tool with a cylindrical-end cutter bit along the edge of each intake relief to lay back the rear of the notch slightly. We removed a minor amount of material to allow the valves to travel into the pockets without hitting the edge of each relief. Most aftermarket performance pistons are designed with notches large enough to accommodate the big valve heads, so this could have been avoided had we opted to bore the block and replace the pistons from the start.

To rebuild the stock bottom end, we ordered a re-ring kit for $135 from Northern Auto Parts that consisted of Speed-Pro plasma-moly rings, a complete Victor Reinz gasket set, and Clevite 77 bearings. We cleaned out the ring grooves with a broken ring and snapped the new ones in place.

Small-block Fords use a thrust bearing installed on the center (No. 3) bearing saddle. As with all bearings, the proper way to install them is to line up the bearing tang with the notch in the bore and snap the bearing into place. Never install bearings dry; always use assembly lube on the bearing surface. We checked bearing clearances with a dial bore gauge and a micrometer on the rod and main journals, but if you don't have these tools, inexpensive Plastigage, available at most auto parts stores, will suffice.

We brought the stock cylinder heads to M&R Machine for a rebuild, which consisted of installing new bronze valve guides, cutting the seats on a Serdi valve machine, and decking the heads. Here, cylinder-head assembler Johnny Gonzalez reinstalls the stock springs after checking the seats and open pressures at the proper installed height. We were surprised to find that the used springs were still in great shape, with 130 pounds on the seat and 220 pounds of open pressure at 0.0500 inch of lift, more than adequate for the stock cam and the Lunati we upgraded to.	The junkyard long-block we bought didn't come with a distributor, so we ran the Holley billet distributor and Annihilator spark plug wires that are spec'd with the Street Avenger engine system. Be aware that if you're running a steel-core roller cam like we did, you'll have to change the distributor drive gear from the stock iron gear to a roller-compatible steel gear. You can get these gears from Ford or Lunati.
The Holley heads, like most aftermarket small-block Ford heads, are drilled with holes for 1/2-inch head bolts, so they can be used on 351 Windsors. Ford 289s and 302s, however, use 7/16-inch head bolts. The solution is to get an ARP head-bolt kit that comes with hardened stepped washers (arrow) that center the smaller head bolts.
	Stagw I: 278 Hp for $1,290 For our first test, we ran the Ford with stock iron heads, stock cam, stock factory exhaust, and topped off with the Stage I Street Avenger components: a Weiand Stealth dual-plane manifold and a Holley 670-cfm Street Avenger carb. Result: 278 hp at 5,200 rpm and 315 lb-ft of torque at 4,100 rpm. Total cost: $1,290. That works out to $4.64 per horsepower.
Stage II: 309 hp for $2,150 We upgraded to Stage II of the Street Avenger system with a cam and header swap. The Street Avenger Hot Street package recommends Lunati PN 51017, with 218/228 degrees of duration at 0.050 and 0.536/0.536-inch lift on a 112 LSA. We'd previously mocked up the engine with this cam, and there was no problem with the piston-to-valve clearance on the stock Ford heads; however, Lunati ground the cam on a smaller basecircle than the stock cam (possibly to clear the crank in a stroker application such as a 347), so we had to change to longer pushrods to accommodate the nonadjustable factory-valvetrain arrangement. We also swapped on a set of Doug's Headers tri-Y headers designed for a '65 Falcon, the car we ultimately intend to swap this engine into. Although these are obviously not the headers you'd get from Holley's Hooker division, we had used them in the past and knew they kicked ass in the power department. At $550, they're also pretty spendy with ceramic coating. We included them in our price list, but depending on your car, Hooker may have a cheaper alternative. Result: 309 hp at 5,500 rpm and 324 lb-ft at 4,500 rpm, a gain of 31 peak horsepower and 9 lb-ft. Total cost: $2,150, or $6.96 per horsepower.	Stage III: 352 hp for $3510 For Stage III, we bolted on a set of Holley Street Avenger aluminum cylinder heads (PN 300-579) with 2.02/1.60-inch valves and 60cc chambers. They're set up for stud-mount rockers, so we also swapped on a set of Lunati 1.6:1 roller rockers with polyloks. The taller rockers require taller valve covers, and Holley recommends Ford Racing PN M-6582-E302; Westech just happened to have a set on one of Hot Rod's engines, so we scammed them. Result: 352 hp at 6,400 rpm and 328 lb-ft at 4,500 rpm, a gain of 43 hp and 4 lb-ft. Grand total: $3,510, or $9.97 per horsepower.