Well, there's nothing wrong with a warmed up 351w. If you use a Torquer cam or a Delta torque grind, run aluminum heads with small dish pistons to hit about 9.8:1, and a spread-bore carb on a dual plane manifold, you should be pretty good. Headers would most likely be mid-length tri-y style due to space constraints in a car, and with your 2.5 rear gear there's no reason you couldn't get the results you're after.

 

The camshaft I picked out is supposed to make very strong trq. its also designed to work with stock converters and axle gears.

The headers though for the car only come as full length super comp headers. I think they would hurt low rpm trq more than they would help. I was only thinking about them cause stock manifolds wouldnt be efficent for a displacement larger than 351.

I would prefer atleast a 383 stroker but I dont want to end up with a $6,000 - $7,000 engine. The 420 I had priced out at $5,200 but I could have got the price down to $4,500 by using some parts over such as the dampner and the flexplate the car currently has.

But now that you mention a warmed up 351w, I realized I can get a complete 351W block kit with heads from P.A.W. for $2,500. They have the same larger valve heads (1.94"/1.60" valves) as comes with the 420 stroker and I can get them in either 60cc or 69cc heads, compression ratios I could request be between 8.4:1, 9.1:1, 9.7:1, or 10.8:1 (cast iron heads so I think the highest I could go and still get away with 87-89 would be around 9.1:1).



With 9.1:1 compression 1.94"/1.60" valves, the 206*/212* - 0.461"/0.474" - 110 LSA camshaft, and a 600cfm 4V holley I should break the 300hp mark with the large tube headers and should easily be around 400 - 450 lbs of trq.

I could get just the short block kit for $1695 and put my money into some aluminum ford racing gt40 heads (64cc would be larger than the 60 cc heads that nets me the 9.1:1 option). I have heard people say the gt40 heads are crap though and their low price probably reflects that.



~Update~

Looks like I would get a way better deal with the 351W block kit. Complete engine with heads results in a price tag of $4,650, nice thing is some of the parts I added in I could reuse from the old (dampner, dist, flexplate) not to mention the price I figured is not subtracting the cost of the pushrods, rockers, and valve springs that the kit comes with and then add the price of the camshaft kit.