One of the things that held me back on really proceeding on the finishing out of the Elco's engine was the idea that the intake I had was for the newer generation cylinder heads with the center bolt valve covers. Our engine has the older gen heads with the side bolt valve covers. Also, there was a matter of sourcing the accessories and the brackets for them. This would've meant hitting the junkyards trying to find everything to do a serpentine belt setup then spending more money for a new intake. But there was an alternative. We happened to have another 305 engine up in the garage we traded for a transmission a couple years back. This engine is an older gen engine, complete with accessories and brackets and of course heads. Even though it has the intake its got a Rochester and spread bore pattern, not desirable. What I thought about was removing all this hardware, sans intake, and installing it on the Elco's engine, removing the newer heads in the process. Of course as is always the case with these jobs, its never straightforward, there's always something to get in the way. The impact wrench helped out immensely in removing all the bolts for the accessories so they came off rather fast. All the other mentioned items in the pic came off fast nonetheless even with manual tools. Moving along I removed the middle bolts for the intake, getting it off and out of the way along with the distributor, pulling both pieces free. With that, it was time for the impact wrench to meet the cylinder heads. I had to loosen up the rocker arms in order to get them to spread apart enough in order to reach the head bolts that were situated between the rockers. Once those were all loose, it was a quick job to loosen up all the head bolts. On the first cylinder head I had to tap it some in order to get it to pop free as it seemed like this engine was never apart in all its life. The second head came free pretty fast and easy at least. The head gaskets looked super worn so more than likely that was the issue with this engine, the head gaskets were probably shot and im sure the rod bearings were worn pretty good too. Even though I don't need the distributor due to having one for the Elco, I'll definitely be keeping this unit as it's a standard HEI dizzy for SBC engines. We have another engine in the garage that is a long block, needing an intake and as such could use the distributor. In fact, I could use the spread bore intake I just pulled off this engine and an adapter to allow me to use the square bore Edelbrock carburetor that I typically use for that engine as well. I just need to pull the harmonic balancer and I'll have everything I need to change over the Elco's engine and get it closer to completion, even if the rest of the car is not complete yet.
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