Other than a change to a 1972 cast iron four barrel intake and a camshaft/valvespring/timing chain swap in 1994, nothing has ever been done to the internals of this 350 engine.
With the boy by my side we pulled the engine apart and did some forensic examination of the parts. I'm a firm believer in actually examining what you have as you take it apart and not just throwing everything in a pile in the center of the garage. We found some interesting things.
The lifter valley was reasonably clean with a little tarnish on everything. Cam looked fine.
The double roller timing chain was stretched quite a bit. When you set it at "0" on the timing mark and then tried to rotate the crank, you get the mark on the balancer to line up with the "4" degree mark before the distributor rotor would move. Thats a bit too much slack.
Pulled the 6X heads and it looked like a bit of oil was burning in some of the cylinders. If you looked into the exhaust ports you could see the oil sludge seeping though the guides.
