'68 16 heads on a 350?
 

Now that we've got the suspension and brakes taken care of on the Ventura, I'm starting to think about what to do with the engine. We fired it up last night and it blew gobs of blue smoke. No real surprise there. Long term, this engine needs a rebuild, but I'm wondering if I can band aid things in the mean time.

I'm pretty sure the valve stem seals are original and toast. There's no indication the heads have ever been off the car or touched at all. I was thinking about replacing the factory o-rings on the 46 heads with a fresh set to try to stem the oil burning. Tedious and labor intensive, but cost effective.

I also have a set of '68 16 heads sitting around pretty much ready to bolt on. This might be a hair-brained idea since 1) I'm not sure if the big valve heads will work on the 350 2) I'm not sure we could swap the heads without pulling the engine due to the A/C.

...or we could just leave it be and put a quart of oil in every so often until we're ready to rebuild it. If this weren't coming out of my son's pocket, I'd just pull the thing are go through it. What would you all do?

To answer your question, yes you can just bolt those heads on.

In terms of just replacing the valve seals on your heads , doing such on the rear of the side with the AC will not be much fun, ask me why I know.

If your oil burning issue is combo of weak rings and worn cylinders along with shot valves seals then freshly rebuild heads might make things only 50% better, but still that’s an improvement.

If the motor puff’s blue out the exh at idle when the oil is hot then that is definitely bad valve seals.

Hi Ken,
What year 350 engine? I've done the exact swap on a 68 350 that had valve reliefs in the cylinders for both intake & exhaust. Later years the reliefs changed, sometimes no reliefs on the intake side. I will say that was a tough little engine with an 068 cam, surprised a lot of people.

‘74 350 2BBL.

I’m sure everything is tired in this engine. I need to do a leakdown and compression test to see how bad it is.

here is a pic of my 1970 350 showing the valve reliefs

I am putting #12 heads on my 350, and hoping it will not be a problem (not fired up yet)

the 1968 heads will not have the hole for the 1974 alternator/ power steering brackets; but there are ways around that...

I think Jim Hand's book has an answer...

….which is my shelf in the garage. I’ll give it a look.

I got to dig in on the 350 a little more. It's not as bad as I thought it might be, but it's also not as good as it could be. Compression is down substantially on a couple cylinders so it eventually needs a rebuild. As I suspected, the valve stem o-rings are toast. I'm going to go ahead and replace those in the mean time to try to stem the oil consumption while we plan for a rebuild. The valves only the o-ring on them. Just confirming the other seals (FelPro 13350) aren't used in a bone stock setup.

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