i bought an old 360 for parts. The only thing i really wanted was the heads and maybe the dizzy weights. My concern is one head is a c8 and the other is a d2. Did either have hardened seats from the factory and would they work ok together. I know they are very similar heads. Next how did you remove the camshaft after the plate is off? I wonder if anyone has used 360 pistons in a 390. I know the compression height is diferent. I am deciding what i want to keep but since i know i never plan on building up a whimpy 360 I might not have any use for the crank, rods, and pistons, and not to mention the 2bbl intake.

 

Well Matt,

Think about the heads this way..if it had been running in the past it would have to have had hard seats to run todays fuel..and the engine wouldnt run long with 1 head with hard seats and the other with leaded seats..-Russ

 

russ is right. if one head had hardend seat and the other didn't. you would have a mess on your hands !! the 360 isn't all that bad. i wouldn't compare it to a 390 but they can be built for decent performance.

 

Most D2TE heads had hard seats, from the factory the C8AE heads did not.

My C1AE heads do NOT have hard seats and have been in use for about 80,000 miles with NO problems.FWIW

I believe it takes a considerable amount of time to get valve seat reccession.

Opinions???

 

i think its the luck of the draw !!! some people have the luck of nothing ever happening, then people like myself, if somethings going to break, it going to break

 

I bought the engine from a guy i know somewhat but it was sitting and it was the most oil caked motor i have ever saw. When diassembling the heads, the c8 were in better condition, the valves, guides, and seals were much better than the d2. That led me to believe the other d2 went to crap and it was replcaed with a redone c8 head at some time. The d2 seals are rock hard and had a burnt exhaust valve. umh wonder were i have seen that at before, anyway i thought d2 come from the factory with hardened seats but wanted to refresh my memory. It doesn't matter because i would get hardened seats in them when i got done up.

 

I have to side with Putt. I may be wrong, but that's nothing new to me. My old LTD 390 has 180,000 miles on the clock with non-hardened seats. Probably 50,000 of those miles have been run on the cheapest unleaded 87 octane gasoline (if you want to call it gasoline) you could find. It was my dads old car. He'd drive a mile to get gas a cent cheaper. The heads as well as the rest of the motor are in A1 condition. But I still think the deciding factor is how the vehicle is used/driven and other factors such as fuel ratio and timing. The LTD was driven easy it's whole life. When you get to tractors or heavy trucks that get driven harder maybe hardened seats make a difference. But then again we've got quite a few old tractors in use with unhardened seats also. When did they do away with leaded fuel.....mid-late 80's?? No valve problems yet. Maybe we're just lucky. When I rebuilt my 360 to a 390 the heads I used are C6's given to me by a friend. The seats and guides were as pretty as any i've ever seen. So I left them be. The guides were gone in my D2's. I guess time will tell. If I needed seats I would by all means have installed hardened ones. Have all that many people had trouble with the unhardened seats?? Everybody I talk to that says unhardened seats are no good nowadays always start their sentence with "Well, the machine shop told me". I just think some machine shops like to install hardened seats for some reason.....

 

On a rebuild, hardened seats on the exhaust valves are a VERY good idea.