Rowdy and Mean 318 build

AJ/FormS said
Your tune was way off on the 262* equipped 360. Mostly I think The T-port sync was off. And the 900 idle IN-GEAR!!proves it. It shoulda been happy at 750, maybe less. With a 4speed it woulda been happy at 650/700.
The transition was hard cuz mostly there wasn't any. I bet the idle-timing was 18* or more and the mixture screws were kindof dead. If that is true, then the sync was off for sure.
The 750 is almost too small for a 360. It will be just right on a 318 with a 268 cam. The primaries will work just fine on any SBM. The smaller the better.
Forget 2.94s with any cam much over stock.

But back up the bus.
Something is going on here. If you were happy with the 360,and it's 262 cam and the 2.94s, then why the sudden desire for 400 hp. I mean that 262 mightof made 330, but it didn't arrive until 54 mph with those 2.94s
Mr.D3
You need gears before anything. If you like, put all the 360 stuff on that teener including the 262 cam.Get the compression up. Then get you some gears in the range of 3.23s to 3.91s,the higher the better, if hiway travel is not important. I guarantee you that teener in an A-body, with 3.91s and that 2600TC will be good for ear-to-ear grins! You will want to get the static CR up to 9.8, for a Dcr of 8.2@165psi This is doable. The power will be down some 13%,compared to the 360, but the performance increase with 3.91s will be some 33%, for a net improvement over the 360, of plus 20%. Plus 20% is H-U-G-E !
Your new power peak with 3.91s will arrive at around 42 mph, NOT 54 as it did with the 360.

I appreciate the input as always but just to clear a few things up... first off that cam was 256* advertised duration on the intake side, 262* was on the exhaust. I wasn't satisfied with the way that 360 ran, brutal torque off idle but it ran out of steam by 5200 RPM. Second regarding tuning, multiple times I reduced the overall timing due to pinging from the high cylinder pressure and last it was running it had only 8 degrees of base timing advance, nowhere near 18* like you guessed. Lastly I really really don't want to run any deeper gears than 3.55s because this will ultimately be a road race car, I'm not concerned with having a cannon-like holeshot for ultimate 60' times at the drag strip. And regarding the transition circuit, the idle mixture screws were actually SO sensitive that I was constantly adjusting them 1/16th of a turn or less at a time because even a 20*F change in temp made it idle noticeably more rich or lean. The only way I could lower the idle speed to open up the throttle plates more was to take out even more timing and with it at only 8* idle timing it had noticeably high underhood temps and I could tell the headers and exhaust were hotter than they should have been.