It will be coming out next week to be stripped down.I can' wait to get it started wasn't planning on doing the 355 for awhile yet.
Looks like a lot of us have similar winter plans.
I'm driving mine this weekend and probably next weekend and then It'll be coming off the road, once the rain starts falling here mid May or so the car doesn't go out anymore unless we get a really nice El Nino winter where it's dry (but that hasn't happened for a few years now). Which makes it the best time to get work done as we usually have about 3-4 months of **** weather then it starts to come good again.
I've had my spare engine and the 355 kit for about 18 months now, but the cars been running so well lately and budget hadn't permitted after spending about $15k on the car last year so I'd kept running the car with the 304 as long as I could.
But the cracks are starting to show now. I'm not 100% happy with the paint job I did in the engine bay after the fire and bay smoothing and want to redo it, I did it in 40+ degree weather so theres a fair bit of dry spray which at the time I wasn't too concerned with as I had 1,000,000 other things to worry about to repair the car after the incident. However I've got more time to focus on it now so I want to make it right, the exterior of the car shines like a mirror, the engine bay needs to as well.
The engine has also been pretty tired for a few years now, when I bought the engine I'm running now it already had 180,000km on it and I just resealed it, threw a cam in it that was way to big and then ran it multiple times at the track and gave it a hard time. It's done really well, it's probs got 270,000km on it now after 10ish years. It still runs but the valve train is starting to get a bit chattery under RPM (most likely tired original cam bearings as they didn't look great last time I checked them and the cam, lifters, rockers etc are all only a few years old so it's unlikely to be them) and last time I checked the compression it wasn't looking super flash but about consistent with what you'd expect from a 30 year old donk with that kind of milage and a cam with lots of overlap.
So I'd rather build the new engine now and get it installed before I hurt the old 304 too much as with the prices of these engines on the second hand market now, I always want to have a good engine sitting in the shed as a spare for the future as soon they will be impossible to find so the idea is to re-ring, re-bearing, stock cam etc the 304 and have it sitting as a good reliable runner.
The unfortunate thing is to build the new engine the old one needs to be out of the car, because I have 1 set of cylinder heads between the two engines. My heads currently on my engine have had the deck height played with for compression and some basic porting done, so I'll have to send them off to be reskimmed for the new head gaskets and then swapped over onto the new donk. Hence why I've been waiting until now to get started on the build.
