The newest "building a slant six" thread

Cruisingram said
Not looking for serious HP here, low end torque is a very good thing, probably will never see the north side of 4k, and even then only when passing on Saddle road. I got a two barrel manifold coming, have a 38 Weber. got a 225 /6 that is bone stock. I will have to look at what year again to remember, early 70s I think, could be older. I just want to do the old tried and true thing- intake manifold, exhaust, cam. I don't want to grind on heads, put a lot of money into building the snot out of this thing. The 225 replacing the 170 alone will help a lot! I have an auto transmission and it is going into my wife's 68 Dart four door. The main mods to the car will be this motor, AC and good brakes. After that, it is done and ready just for transportation in style around the island. So I am just looking for a good slam it in and go cam, and if it is worth it to buy some headers or go with the Rustyratrod just open up the stock manifold and go 2-1/4 exhaust. Looking through all the cam discussion really didn't answer my question on my particular build.

You said you ‘don’t want to grind the head’ does that mean you don’t want to do any porting or you don’t want to have the head / block cut to raise compression? For a low rpm street motor the stock valves and ports are fine, but every slant can use a bump up on compression.
When you rebuild your slant it is not likely that you will be able to find a replacement stock metal head gaskets. The typical FM composite slant head gaskets have a compressed thickness of around .036 so you are loosing compression right out of the box when you rebuild a slant.
Measure piston recession, cc the combustion chamber and use an online compression calculator to help you get to the target.
Getting the static compression up to 8.5 to 1 is the best way to increase low end torque.
Perhaps the second best thing to do to increase low end torque is to re curve the distributor. Bringing in the mechanical advance sooner can do wonders for a torque curve.