Building a 434 Small Block Chevy

I used a soft face hammer to tap the pistons in with. By grabbing the hammer head, it made for a nice handle to hold while working the piston through the ring compressor. It doesn't take a lot of force to do knock these in. You know you've gone far enough when the ring compressor collapses. Now you just tap the piston all the way to the crankshaft while reaching around the back of the block with your other hand to guide the rod to the crank.

Here you can see the rod all the way down against the crankshaft ready to put the rod cap on. I like to keep the crank in this position when I'm installing each piston. It makes it easier to attach the rod to the crank because you can reach around to support the rod and guide it by hand.

I set the torque wrench to 63 foot pounds and tightened the bolts down. This is what Eagle recommends when using a torque wrench or you can use a rod bolt stretch gage which is more accurate but I don't own one. After doing this eight times, the short block was almost done. I didn't have any trouble with this part of the engine and kept wondering if I left something out or not. I mean it went just like it was suppose to. After the pistons were all in, I trial fit the oil pan on for size. After looking at the rear main seal area, the fun was over and it was back to hard road again as it doesn't seem to fit right....figures!! I'll show some pixs of this later as I have to figure out if I can straighten the pan out or if I have to send it back.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55
56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63