Your machine shop will give you an assessment of what you have to work with and then your decisions will have to be made.

Often it comes down to how many miles do you want out of it and what are your performance expectations. if you're just looking for 50k miles or a little less it looks like you might get by pretty cheap by just freshening it up with the basics. if you want 100k miles expect to bore it, do the heads and turn the crank. if you want better performance the sky is the limit.

FE heads are pretty expensive to rebuild. no matter what you do figure on that expense.

 

That oil pump pick up screen does not look too healthy. Also some times the rocker arm shafts get plugged up. Might want to get the end plugs out and make sure the shaft is clean on the inside,

 

My pickup tube looked like yours. 90+% plugged near as I could tell and I nearly zero oil pressure at startup. I bought a new pickup tube when I did all my bearings/rings etc.

 

This engine ran 60 psi cold and 15 idle, and about 40 while driving

 

Looks like I've got lucky. Trusted machine shop near me said block looked good, everything was standard size. Said I can get away with deglazing and honing the cylinders and going back with standard bearings.

 

great news!

 

That's great news, glad you lucked out. Certainly saves some money. Now you're going to find out how much fun it is to clean parts that you can reuse such as pistons. Be prepared to spend at least 3x's longer cleaning stuff than you think it will take. If you can have your machine shop hot tank the cast iron parts and use a heavy duty washer for the aluminum parts you're reusing it will be worth the investment as far as I am concerned.

 

Yeah, im having them hot tank the block and ive got a buddy with a parts washer so should be all set. I took the crank to the machine shop too and he said it was good to take back home, just needs cleaned as well. I think it's 80k original miles.

 

It's about time I start thinking about a cam, the machine shop said my cam looked good but I didn't keep the lifters in order when I took them out. I've heard / seen the whole cam and lifter debacle on how they can go flat and fail and whatever, so I'm a little wary

 

Is there the equivalent off scott johnson of ford 429/460, tmeyer ford 351m/400 type shop for the ford FE's?

 

I would be very hesitant to reuse the lifters if they weren't kept in order. I have heard of guys rolling the dice and running them anyway and coming out okay. But that's too risky for me, if that lifter goes bad or cam gets eaten up you'll be pulling things back apart to get all the metal shavings cleaned out of your freshly rebuilt engine.

At a minimum I would at least get new lifters, but since you saved all that money not needing to do machine work perhaps upgrade and get an "rv" cam and lifter kit. A cam around the 260ish advertised duration such as comp cams 268, 260 or 252 with valve lift @ .050 somewhere between .450" and .500". You go any bigger than that you'll run into valve train issues since you do not currently have an adjustable rocker arm setup. Oh, and I'm not recommending for or against comp cams, just using them as an example for what numbers to look for. There are a lot of wide ranging opinions about comp cams and use of flat tappet cams in general.

One thing I will say about Comp cams though to keep things in perspective, when you sell more cams than most other manufactures combined, it stands to reason that they would also have more failures than the other manufactures. If you could actually track the numbers of units sold compared to failures I'm thinking a person would find out the percentage of failures across all manufacturers is fairly close.

 

Okay, so what I have currently is a solid flat tappet correct?

 

No, you have a hydraulic flat tappet.

 

Okay, I was a little bit confused

 

Ditto about replacing cam and lifters. But, with flat lifters/cam make sure to use a zinc additive to help with lubrication. Most of today's oil are more for roller cams. Some use diesel oil. Just for kicks, check the bottom of the lifters to see if they are straight across or a bit concaved.