Installed new heads and cam in my 1990 C3500 farm truck 7.4L

[Yamaben]

I inherited this truck from my brother who died a few years back. At first I was excited to own a hard pulling big block truck, but pretty soon I was scratching my head wondering why it felt like my 3.0L Camry could outrun it. After reading and researching a bit, I thought a bump in compression, better cam, intake, and exhaust would help the thing out.

I wish I would have run it on the dyno before the upgrades to have a baseline, but I needed the money for parts and I knew it couldn't possibly be better than 170hp and 325 ft/lbs to the rollers. The guy who runs the speed shop told me he has dynoed Dually 3500s that only put 150hp to the wheels, so I just didn't want to pay $200 for dyno time to find out what I already know.

 

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Starts by getting the hood out of the way

 

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Here is the engine all covered with mouse turds and seeds

 

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Here is a video I made for my wife showing pulling the engine. She knows I'm out in the garage doing something, but she is never sure what. I made a video to show her what was going on out there. A little boring narrative at the start. Skip to 1:08

http://youtu.be/GEAOwG0fVPY?t=1m8s

I pulled the engine separate from the transmission to see if that would be easier. I think it is easier to remove and install the engine and trans as an assembly tho after trying both ways.

 

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Here is the engine bolted to the stand. The stand started to bend with the exhaust, intake manifold, water pump and alternator still attached. I removed those things and it was still pretty heavy for that garage sale engine stand. It says on the stand rated for 750 lbs, and they aren't kidding. I supported the front of the engine with a chain from the rafters almost the whole time I worked on it.

 

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Another picture of mouse turds. I killed my old distributor on engine removal, but I left in in place to keep dirt from falling in the engine . I would have removed it before pulling the engine if I didn't have a new one. I used the old distributor shaft to make an oil pump priming tool.

 

[Yamaben]

Removed the valve covers and intake. The intake was stuck with the force of Zues. Since I wasn't particularly worried about the old intake or heads, I got pretty mean with a chisel and hammer at the edges of the intake, and broke it free. One time a friend and I were prying on his Ford intake with all our might. After it broke a corner off we saw the bolt we had missed taking out.

 

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One head removed. I finally get a look at the dished pistons and peanut ports that I read so much about.

 

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I had read and researched the engine and I had already bought all my parts based on what I thought would do the trick, but the heads and cam I bought were really based on trying to filter out all the bull crap that you read on forums. I really wasn't absolutely certain what the stock CR was (or cam specs for that matter), and therefore I wasn't certain that the heads I bought were going to get me to the 9:1 CR that I wanted.

I needed to measure the stock CR and the combustion chambers in the new heads to be certain I wasn't going to end up with a lower CR, or such a high CR that I needed high octane fuel. That starts with finding TDC

 

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I bought this handy little calibrated pipette and stand from Summit for $118. Here I am measuring the volume of the piston dish, ring land area, deck height, and valve relief all in one shot. This should be pretty accurate IMO. The volume of this area is 13cc on this engine.