1968 SS Dart in progress

Hope all of you in the U.S.A. had a great Thanksgiving holiday. I spent this past Friday through Sunday building the heads and finishing off the long block.
After receiving the heads from Chuck's Speed Center here in Phoenix AZ. I proceeded to give them a good soapy bath to remove any residual dirt, oil, etc.. After rinsing them, I used the blower to dry them off and a nice big piece of aluminum blew out of one of the water ports! It is pictured and appears to be from the factory. Perhaps from the process of milling the ports? Good thing I had Chuck's check the heads. All of the valve guides needed opened up to proper clearances. All of them were too tight! Never trust a set of box stock heads. Not even for general street use. Chuck' also milled .010 off the heads to bump compression per our request and back cut the valves. After cleaning the heads and drying them off, I completed shimming the Hughes double springs to their recommended installed height of 1.880 of which some required as little as .030 and most required .090 worth of shims not including spring seats!
I cleaned the block surfaces off, prepared the Cometic gaskets with .040 compressed height and installed them followed by the heads using ARP 12 point head bolts and ARP ultra torque also sourced from 440 source.
I proceeded to check fitment of the 440 source roller rockers, and as you can see in the picture, some gentle massaging was required on all 16 rockers to clear the Hughes spring retainers. Fortunately, the 440 source rockers are very thick and provided plenty of material without sacrificing their integrity. After thoroughly cleaning the rockers they went into a shallow bath of 20w50 to saturate the roller tips. 30 minutes later, rocker shaft assembly began and I have a few tricks for those of you using the 440 source hardware. First of all, make sure you order their hold downs, 2 packs of 36 .015 shims, and their .650 spacers. I shimmed end play to .015 per cylinder bank and made sure to center the roller tips on valves. My installation required no shimming of the rocker shafts although I had purchased those as well, just in case. Here's a huge time saving tip for installation of the rocker shafts once all of your shim packs are installed. Make sure you have numbered each of your hold downs with matching numeric markings on your heads and that they match. Next, lightly snug your hold downs using the supplied ARP hardware and place an additional .015 shim somewhere in one area of each rocker pair. Just insert it on top of rocker shaft between an already installed shim pack. This will ensure that as you tighten/torque your hold downs, the shaft will not shift and change all of your clearances! Trust me on this one, it took me a few attempts before I finally wised up to what was happening but they are perfectly spaced to .015 end play at each cylinder bank. The Smith Brothers pushrods just barely clear the top of the head wall upon valve close! It does not look like it in the picture, but with all valves properly lased, you can freely spin all of the pushrods. There is absolutely no binding! Sure as heel thought they were touching upon first examination.
I have prepped the valley pan and hold downs for the Hemi orange paint as well as the block and heads. The Holley 850 double pumper is with Bob Reems at Imagine Injection here in Glendale AZ. getting customized to flow 900 cfm+ and should be finished shortly. The 727 Torqueflite is built complete with manual reverse valve body and a 4000 stall convertor is on order. Wont be long now :-).