so i was cleaning my garage today and got the bug to tear down my original 360 to see just how bad it was .
here's motor when pulled

 

first problem , someone installed rear cam plug backwards

second problem , timing chain way loose !

 

and for the big problem
#1 cylinder piston wrist pin was out and putting grooves in cylinder wall

 

heads looked good , going to try and sell them c8ae-h no smog tube holes

 

now what to do with the block and rotating assembly ? any ideas
scrap ? recycle?

 

Hard to tell from a pic if the #1cylinder is beyond repair. (I know it can be sleeve) they are getting harder and harder to find . Save it if you can.

 

I have a 360 block that has 3 cylinders with wrist pin damage. 2 of the 3 have grooves about 1/8 deep. I have heard that these engines can take a beating and keep running. It must be true because it ran with only a small of amount of ticking, and fairly strong at that. I had ran a compression check on the engine before teardown and had only one cylinder with a very low compression of 30#. The surprising thing was that the 3 cylinders that were damaged still had 90 to 105# of compression. By the way, this was in an old truck I bought for parts and was a "390" engine. Yea right, ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS, check the stroke if you want to be sure.

 

this engine ran great till the day i pulled it. i found the wrist pin problem while fixing an oil pan leak . put it back together and started the 390 build .
my big groove is about 1/8 deep , so beyond boring to fix .