Since the weather makes it difficult to continue work on the body of my truck, I thought I might get working on the engine I plan to plant into it. I pulled the 350 V8 out of my parts truck last Fall and have had it sitting on my engine stand just waiting for my attention. I decided it was time to attempt a rebuild.... Watching a number of YouTube videos got me all excited about tearing this thing down and seeing if I could put it all back together again in a way that would give me a solid power plant for my project. I enjoyed tearing it down and inspecting all the pieces and it appears to be in amazing condition considering the odometer on the parts truck said it had 188,000 miles on it.
I took my time on it, but after a few sessions I had the whole block disassembled. Nothing looked bad to me, but I'm no expert. I just didn't see any major damage to anything and I wondered if the motor had previously been rebuilt already. I posted a few photos online in some of the truck Facebook groups and got some opinions on that. My conclusion is that it had not been rebuilt before because it showed no indication of it but only seems to be original GM components throughout... at least the internals.
While taking it apart I knew from watching Youtube videos that it is important to keep track of where each part came from and should be returned to. I marked all the rod and main caps with marks to be sure they go back together correctly and I placed all the pushrods, lifters and main caps into a board I made up to organize them. The pistons have new identifying marks on their connecting rods and I placed them in a box in the same order as there were in the engine. Eventually I got the whole motor disassembled and loaded up the block, crank and heads and took them to a machine shop I found locally. The owner there said the engine had never been rebuilt before and that the crank would need polishing, the block boring and the heads would need a valve job. I'm hoping to negotiate some barter in exchange for the machine work... more to come on that.