Best 273 and 318 builds (NO 360's please)

A few years back worked on a 65 valiant w/ a barracuda front end swap on...I believe it used to belong to a duo called the "barker boys" or "brothers" or something or another. Had 4 speed manual w/ 3.23 8 3/4 rear.

The owner had been running low 15's @ 88-89 mph with an engine of then fairly unknown details.

Brought it into my home garage to help the owner swap in 302 swirl port heads/cam/and a set of spitfire headers.

Once we got the heads off, it was obvious that the closed chamber swirl ports wouldn't work...since the short block had 11.5:1 doomed pistons in it....and the cam was roughly a similar size to what we were swapping in when we checked with a micrometer...roughly a cam similar to a 340 auto cam.

SO, came up with a plan B:

Ported 360 heads retaining the 1.88 valve arrangement.
MP 284 camshaft (284 degrees duration, ~ 243 @ .050, .484 lift, 108 lsa)
swapped the old school torker single plane intake for a eddy rpm.
Spitfire headers (there were minor issues w/ the z-bar...but nothing unsurmountable)
650 cfm double pumper carb.
recurved the ignition so that pretty much all timing was in by 2200rpm, initial 18 btdc, total 38btdc...swapped the orange box to a silver.

This really woke the car up...to the tune of 13.3's/13.4's @ 104mph! A very healthy improvement.

What was holding the combo back were obviously the stockish 318 heads that had been on there. However, changing pretty much all the breathing components, and having the advantage of stout compression really let us push the engine a bit. Car ran great on the street and at the strip.

Never could persuade the owner to make the next mod, which was to go with steeper gears b/w 3.90's to 4.30's....with something like that, he'd have had a 12 second beast of a stock cubed 318.

Still, had issues w/ clutches due to the small size...even went to a custom clutch with little avail.