Now to the fun stuff! Under the hood!

360 bored .040" over
stock cast crank cut .020"/.020"
stock rods, recon'd with ARP bolts
balanced rotating assembly
9.5:1 forged Speed-Pro pistons
Competition Cams XE-274
Edelbrock aluminum cylinder heads, 63cc
Edelbrock RPM Performer manifold
Holley 670CFM Street Avenger carb
Long-tube Hooker Competition headers
MP distributor, MSD 6AL ignition

In bay assembly. The headers were dropped in the bay first and tied back. This made for a super easy installation. The Hooker Competition F body headers also cleared everything. I was really surprised I didn't have to ding the tubes anywhere. The only thing of note is you will need the later model mini-starter to clear the header tubes. Also getting to plugs #5 and #7 are a pain in the ass, as well as the header bolts in that same area. You'll need allen headed bolts for the back two.

Installed and ready to roll. This picture was taken right after cam brake-in. With the XE-274 and 9.5 compression the cam pulls about 13" of vacuum. Just enough for the power brakes. Desktop Dyno puts this motor at over 400 horse. Once I've got a 1,000 miles on it, I plan on setting it up on a chassis dyno.

For a trans, the stock unit was an auto three speed A998; which liked to eat second gear. A friend who runs a local salvage yard had an A500 laying around and offered to sell it to me for $250. The thought of having a 4 speed overdrive trans was nice, so I jumped on it. The pain in the neck was that the trans tunnel was too small to accomodate the larger trans. The OD section on the trans was too big to clear the stock cross-member. Cutting the old one out, welding a new one in that follows the tunnel made out of 2x3 box tube, and a custom trans mount fixed the problem. Overdrive and lockup are electronically controlled by two seperate switches. The OD is wired into the cruise control switch since I pitched the cruise a long time ago. With 3.55 gears, 70 MPH only turns 2,000 RPM with OD and lockup engaged.

For the torque converter I went with a TCI 2400 stall. Two years ago the old TC cracked four days before the Woodward Dream Cruise and I was in a huge pinch to put the car back on the road. This was the only high stall lock-up converter I could get my hands on in time. Maybe when other things are done a PTC or Dynamic converter will be this car's future.