New to the forum and new to fe motors. Been into hot rodding most of my life, so I have a pretty good knowledge base. Sorry, this may be a long first thread. I bought a 64 Comet Caliente a while back that had been setup for, and included a 390 fe motor. The car is pretty nice, but the motor was apart, as the owner said he blew a head gasket. Bought the car from calif, and I live in florida. When I received the car, he failed to tell me that the motor had been apart for a long, long time. The block was toast, it was bored out .060 and most of cylinders rusted. The car came with newly machined and ported cobra jet heads, with 2.090 intakes, and 1.750 ex. valves. I also got a factory low rise two four intake with carbs and cobra air cleaner and valve covers. The motor had TRW 12.5:1 pistons in it. So, I found another 390 block locally, and started taking apart the old block. Someone had put a lot of time and effort into it, as the oil pump plate bolts were safety wired, it had cobra jet rods, and the pistons looked almost new, the skirts showed almost no wear. The cam is a Crane solid lifter F-266/3528-8 that looks nice. The old block had exhaust valve notches cut in the cylinders. I had the replacement block machined for the pistons, and new cam bearings installed, and had the decks skimmed to clean them up. I forgot to have the machine shop notch the cylinder bores on the block. I wanted to check things out myself, so I removed one of the exhaust valve springs, and bolted up the head on the new block with an old head gasket to look at the exhaust valve from inside the cylinder. I put my dial indicator on the valve tip and measured .365 until the valve hit the block. I then looked up how to check for total valve lift out of the head measuring the cam. I measured 1.700 lobe height from base circle bottom to lobe peak. Base circle measured 1.360. Subtracting those leaves .340, and multiplying that times 1.76 for rocker arm ratio gives me .598 total valve lift. Subtract the original .365 that the valve moved before hitting the head, and that leaves .233 valve travel into the cylinder bore. I looked at the old block, and it looks like the upper piston ring mark is about 9/32, or .281 from the top of that deck. The valve lash is .026, so that theoretically could be subtracted from the gross lift I suppose. Doing that, and subtracting the .207 from the 9/32 (.281) leaves me .074 from the valve face to the upper piston ring top. Is this enough clearance? And how much clearance would be safe around the radius of the valve to the block notch?
Thanks guys
