Thats what under the hood of my Nova looks like! What kind of gas mileage do you get ? When you pull the head will you measure and post how far down the hole the piston is at tdc please? Jay 6155
Yes, the Camaro and Nova, kissing cousins. My first car was a 1976 Camaro and the owners manual was a combination for both the Nova and Camaro.
I figured out my mileage and posted it at nastyz28.com awhile back. I'll have to go reread my thread to find out what I got. But it's a bit low. The previous owner had decided to sawzall the catalytic converter off and replace it with a turbo muffler, so the lack of exhaust back pressure makes it impossible to fully tune it. I've got a shop who is going to replace the entire exhaust pipes with 2.5" single system and performance muffler. Then I should be able to get it properly tuned and find out its real baseline. I discovered the half exhaust manifold on the integrated head has the exit in the same place as the HD truck 292 manifold and has a three stud connector, so I can put the exhaust pipes on it now that I'm going to be running with the eventual manifold swap.
Yes, my 43k mile 250 is untouched since it was first assembled, so it's like an archeological dig when I start to take the top end off. I plan to CC the heads and piston tops to see what the factory specs were, take a micrometer to what I can recover from the head gasket, and measure the deck height. I've been playing around with a dynamic compression calculator trying to guess what the factory combo was to get the 8.1:1 static compression ratio, so I can start imputing changes to the cylinder head and cam in an attempt to get it as close to 8.5:1 DCR as I can without having to pull the short block to deck it and replace pistons yet. The Fel-Pro 8006 0.040" thick head gasket is really making it tough to keep the CR up, but I don't know of any thinner ones that are available. When the temperature warms up again, I'd like to get out in the garage with TDC gauge and try to estimate the ABDC for the stock cam too.
