My newest purchase...

So I responded to an ad on CL recently about a 318 for sale for $1000. The ad said it had about 7000miles on a rebuild, and that he pulled it to put a hot 340 in his restored duster. He didn't build the engine or the car, he had purchased from a dealer out west that specialized in old Mopars.

So I took the bait and went to look at it. It had obviously been touched up with a paint can after removing, but it looked fairly clean. It had an Eddy Performer 318/360 intake and some cheapo chrome valve covers. No distributor, pulleys, carb, etc.., as he repurposed those parts for his 340.

He let me pull the valve covers to take a look, and sure enough, it looked like new. Beefy double valve springs and retainers, new rockers and pushrods. He had tons of receipts but many of them were faded and hard to read. Anyway, we struck a deal for $700 and he threw in a new set of 8mm plug wires. I was happy with deal has he was.

Anyway, I brought it home and put it on a stand in the shop where it sat for a few weeks. Then had a friend looking to but a cheap aluminum intake, so I pulled the Eddy Performer and sold it to him for $100. Sweet! I'm at $600 for the engine!

Well when I pulled the intake I noticed a few things, namely a Mopar Purple cam and the heads, which are "302" heads, had been heavily ported and actually we're larger than a stock set of Jheads. So I did a little digging through the receipts and found that it has a MP P4452761 cam kit.

At this point I'm dying to know if the builder put bigger valves or pistons in it. So I pulled the head and sure enough, it has 1.88/1.60 valves in it! Woot woot! The pistons are valve relief factory replacements that are sitting 0.080" in the hole. Sadface...

Any ways, I pulled out my head CCing kit and did some math. Looks like, with stock head gaskets I'm at a true 8.5:1 and with the thinner Mr Gasket head gaskets, I should be at 8.75:1.

I'm thinking I'll throw on one of my Eddy LD340 intakes, a 625 Street Demon, some headers and throw it in my old '77 D100. Should be fun!