Cam Selection 360

Factory covers with baffles, yes.

One little tidbit I left out is that I also get a ton of whistling from the PCV, even after changing it.

Curious: The PCV is pulling a lot of oil and it's noisy. So, I put a vacuum gauge on it. The engine's almost pulling a whopping 23 inches at idle!

Now, when I set the timing, I put as much into it as it would take. I landed on 18-19 base, 37 all in. Balancer accuracy verified during the build.

That seems like a lot of initial to me, even for a stock lo-po engine, and that also seems like a lot of vacuum to me. So, I backed the base timing down to a reasonable 11 or so. Whistling PCV has stopped. Vacuum down to a healthy 19 inches. Puffs of smoke after idle disappeared so far.

I'm curious if it's possible that too much vacuum can pull too much oil thru the PCV and passed the valve stem seals? Someone check my sanity with that assumption!

If so, I suppose if I want to get back to my original timing setting, I'll need a different carb than the original that will better fit the whole system. After all, the original carb was sized by Chrysler with the original cam, original timing settings (TDC base), right?