Pressed Wrist Pins?
 

I am by no means an authority on FE's but I have built a few and they are my favorite gas engines of all time. I was under the impression that all FE's had bushed rods with floating pins. That's all I've ever encountered or read about. I even found a coulple of threads in this forum that stated so. Then how is it that I just tore down a 360 (which had been rebuilt before) that a friend gave me to find the pins pressed in? I wasn't able to disassemble them but I could definately see bushings in the small end and the slugs had grooves for locks but there were none installed. Five of the rods are C7TE-A's while the other three are C1AE-A's. Is this a common practice? And why the heck would you do it anyway? Everyone knows that floating pins are superior.

Hmm... a C7TE rod is a truck rod, and back in 1967, that means it came from an FT. I think.

We've heard of at least one FT that someone opened up to find it had pressed-in pins.

It's definitely a 360? What's the crank code? 2T?

I haven't checked the crank but the stroke is right for a 360. I don't know much about it since it came from a friend's '74 prerunner project. He bought the truck last year with no heads on the engine then gave me the shortblock recently since he's a Windsor guy. I guess it doesn't really matter since I'll be runing a stroker rotating assembly but I thought it was odd, especially since there are definately bushings in the rods. It seems to me that when you heat the small ends and press in the pins the bushings would want to slide out. Wouldn't a pin large enough to create an interference fit with the bushing do the same in the bores in the piston? It seems that either smaller ID bushings would be needed or the pin bores in the slugs would need to be opened up. Wierd.

Finally did enough scraping and yes it is a 2T.

Very weird. Sounds like someone maybe used a 361FT as a donor engine. Or they were a diehard Chevy fan and couldn't figure out you need to hone the new rod bushings out and just pressed the pin in and left it :-X14

That's about all I could figure, otherwise you would end up with the fitment issues I mentioned earlier.

I think Krewat is right about the installer not knowing about honing to fit, I've seen this on one 390 I tore down years ago. The owner "rebuilt" one cylinder because of broken ring lands and couldn't get the engine to turn over. He brought it to me, I tore it down and found out (after the fact) that he had hammered the pin into the new rod!!
But as a side note, I was looking in Silv-O-Lite's catalog and they list pistons with pressed in pins for the 360 & 390. #1131H is for floating pins and uses a .9752" diameter wrist pin. #3192H is for non-floating applications and uses a 1.0402" pin.
Personally I've never seen a pressed pin FE and don't really see the need for them, I prefer floating pin myself. Just call me "old school".

There was one person, about 6 months (maybe even a year) ago that posted he took apart an FE/FT engine and it had pressed-in wrist pins. So this isn't the first time I've heard of it... weird.