[mike nixon]

SO I Got the valves hand lapped and the heads back on it, and fired up. Engine is still as clean as the day it's assembled, circa 1984 ish, in the crankcase. The pistons had about an 1/8" of carbon on the tops of them so I got after them with a roloc disc and an angle grinder and cleaned them up. This must've dropped the compression a significant amount as I can't make it detonate now. It had me worried for a few miles initially as she was blowing antifreeze out the tail pipes at a pretty alarming rate. All of what was in the heads must've runn straight down the manifolds into the mufflers. I forgot they'd do this when you didn't drain the system below the level of the heads. She literally smoked bad enough that you couldn't see the rear bumper for two miles. I also pulled the distributor and relocated it to the proper position instead of the Chevy guy's idea of timing that wasn't even close to what should've been there. The idle was still rough so I pulled the carb down and blew it out with choke cleaner and air reassembled it and reset it and it's now back to running smoothly. I've also been playing with the timing as this thing has a low lift cam in it that's pretty senstive to base timing, it runs the best within a 4 degree window and I don't remember what the number was., I need to write that down when I get it dailed in! I had actually thought about going with a true HO cam grind but decided not to do that yet.