1968 Barracuda Notch - Plano, TX

OK... flashback to 2001. I built a nice "new" 440 for my Barracuda. The machine work on the block and heads was done by Muscle Motors in Lansing, Michigan. Part of the deal with doing the job with them was that they did all the prep on the block. They align bored the mains with ARP studs, line hone the cam journals, decked the block, opened up oil passages, increased the pick up size to 1/2", balanced the rotating assembly, milled the heads, did some minor porting on the heads, and etcetera. I chose and purchased the camshaft, rods, pistons, rings, torque converter, balancer, rockers, rocker shafts, pushrods, bearings, intake, and a few other parts from them. I had them ship everything on pallets to the local yellow freight, then I checked everything and assembled it myself. Since they were taking a profit on the parts and machine work they made me a package deal and I paid a little less. If I had bought many of these parts separately I would have probably paid more overall. Besides, I was leaning on their knowledge base to help me with some of the decisions I think it is fair they get some of the payback.

Anyway - one issue on assembly was that the intake did not fit. It was off by quite a bit, I could only see about half of the bolt hole in the head through the hole in the intake. I talked with the guys at MM and they said this was not unusual with the heads and block both being machined. So I made some measurements and took the intake to a local buddies machine shop where we took 0.110" off both sides. That is a lot! But everything lined up afterwards.

So, one of the first things I checked with the new intake is if it fit. It looked like it would need considerable milling as well. So I put this off. Originally I had planned to run this intake with my iron heads, but, with the need to cut on the intake I decided to go a different direction. My long term plan was to go with a nice set of aluminum aftermarket heads. Well, if I was going to have to cut, I wanted to cut once! So I decided to hold off. Once the car left the paint shop I ordered my heads... and waited.

Apparently Edelbrock was out of the heads I wanted when I ordered them in June through the machine shop. They took quite some time to get there, and then a few weeks to be checked, ported, flowed, chambers polished, valves cut, and then assembled. So I finally got them last week. Today I test fit the heads and intake.

Heads fit. Intake fits. Ports line up, no additional cutting needed! Wow!