396 BB Question=Need advice

[geezer#99]

Your 34 total tells you it’s likely set at 10 initial. From the link I gave you, you’ll see that’s not near enough.
When you get the fuel pressure and carb good you’ll need to experiment with your timing.
What’s the elevation where you live?

[alsriv2]

Originally Posted by geezer#99

Your 34 total tells you it’s likely set at 10 initial. From the link I gave you, you’ll see that’s not near enough.
When you get the fuel pressure and carb good you’ll need to experiment with your timing.
What’s the elevation where you live?

Sitting right around 5500ft for the moment, but the truck will spend most of its time right around 4000ft.
Eventually, the truck will go "home" and be at 1100ft, but that will be a year or better out.

[geezer#99]

At elevation you need to start the fire way earlier. You might find you’re up near 20 initial.
When I lived at 3800 feet I had a 396 like yours, I could run a locked in distributor with 30 degrees initial. Always started hot but I couldn’t run more than 10 degrees from the vac advance (at 2000 rpm) or I’d hear low rpm detonation. It was a beast of a motor. I drove it gently thru a 3ott too.
You need to experiment to find your optimal timing.

[alsriv2]

Well spent the weekend installing all new ball joints, '79 chevy front spindles, new 6 lug rotors, all new tie rods ends, brake booster, master cylinder and upgraded brake lines on the fronts. Also put in a Holley electric fuel pump, all new fuel lines. The truck runs so much better with the vacuum leaks fixed from the old booster. Still have to fine tune the carb and timing as there is some stumbling and running rough in the 3-4000 rpm range.

We will work on that once I replace the upper and lower A frame arms and bushings. We continually discover extreme short cuts and crappy work done when the truck was "restored" by a PO 2 owners ago. The truck looked nice when I bought it (I bought it cheap), but the engine was a severe mess and now am finding other serious flaws, but nothing surprising. Now everything will be brand new and done proper.

[Ironangel]

What casting number are on the heads? My .060 over 396 likes 20 initial and 40+ by 3000 rpm...I'm right at 1000ft

[alsriv2]

Originally Posted by Ironangel

What casting number are on the heads? My .060 over 396 likes 20 initial and 40+ by 3000 rpm...I'm right at 1000ft

I am away from the truck right now, but when I ran the numbers back in the beginning, they worked out to be 71 402 heads. These are not the peanut port heads, but the larger port square/rectangle heads. The heads were completely reworked with new valves, seats, guides, retainers, rocker lifters etc.

[alsriv2]

Got bit by an ignition module failure. Haven't had much time with this truck yet, but something just didn't seem right for the amount of $ spent. Even though it made great noise, it just had no real power. Had a couple of circumstances where we thought we had fuel delivery problems and fixed that entirely with a new electric pump, all new lines, fuel sender/pickup etc. Carb was near perfect, but did find a leaking accelerator pump this weekend. Low and behold, while running the engine in the garage, had a big backfire for no apparent reason (low rpm running). We went to work on some wiring issues and forgot about it (the backfire). When we started it 4 hours later, the engine ran like garbage acting like we were missing a couple of cylinders. Dug out a thermal temp reader and discovered I had 4 dead cylinders - engine was "running" on 4 cylinders. Installed a new MSD 6A Digital. Wow! I now have an engine that is running VERY well on all 8 cylinders. Still have wiring issues to address before we can take it out for more test drives. The distributor was a brand new Mallory unit and while it is new, it was also purchased 7 years ago. Amazing it failed with less than 10 hours run time.