440 problems/quenching?/advice needed

I just went to Summit racing and checked their compression calculator. Assuming your pistons are at zero deck and you use gaskets with a .038" compressed thickness the calculator says 10.09 to 1 and that's with flat top pistons. I will tell you that I am biased towards high compression, or at least not going any lower than you need to in order to tolerate the fuel you'll be running. There are plenty of guys, engine builders in particular who will steer people away from pushing it. Its been my experience over the years (I've been at this since the 70s) that keeping compression and/or cylinder pressure up makes a car much more fun to drive, much better off idle throttle response, less throttle opening to propel the car, it sounds better and the car will simply have more snap to it. I got talked into staying at 9 to 1 or lower twice and both times I was very disappointed with the results after spending my time and money building the engines. Now about the lifters and pushrods. The lifters get their oil from the lifter bores. There are oil galleys behind the lifter bores and the lifter bores have holes in them that supply the oil to the lifters. Since you are going to keep your non-adjustable rockers the pushrod length being correct is very important. The plunger in the lifter (hydraulic lifter) needs to be depressed in .020" to .060". Since it is a performance engine you want to stay on the low side with that, ideally around .025". You should be able to check that with a dial indicator. Install a rocker shaft with a couple of rockers and pushrods on one intake and one exhaust on a cylinder where the cam is on the base circle for both the intake and exhaust. Just get the rocker shaft bolts caught at this point, don't tighten them yet. Slowly and evenly start tightening the bolts down while constantly feeling the pushrods to find the point where they don't have any play but are not yet pushing the plunger into the lifter. Once you get there, set up the dial indicator on top of the cylinder head. You need to get the rod of the dial indicator as close to the top of the pushrod dimple on the rocker as possible and the rod needs to be as close to being in a straight line with the pushrod as possible to get accurate readings. If you have never used a dial indicator you should go on YouTube and look for tutorial videos on them. Its a little too much to write it all out here but overall its pretty simple. Once the dial indicator is set up continue tightening down the rocker shaft bolts and torque them to spec and get you reading off the dial indicator. If it turns out the pushrods are too long or too short, your best bet is to buy one pushrod length checker. All it is, is a two piece pushrod with the two parts threaded together and it has a check nut to lock it in when you reach the desired length. The pushrod length checker then gets removed and measured with a micrometer from the contact surfaces of the balls on the ends to tell you what length you need. You can also send the checker (with the jam nut good and tight) to a good pushrod vendor and they can measure it for you to get what you need. If you do that I highly recommend Smith Bros. pushrods, they are a very good company to deal with. The things to take into account with the plunger depth into the lifter is if you run it deep you're more likely to have the lifters pump up at the higher end of your RPMs and/or if you have high oil pressure. If that occurs the valves will not close all the way and there is a risk of the valves hitting the pistons. That is why I recommend staying towards the shallow side with that. Keep us posted.