bad day on the madien voyage

I understand your frustration. I've been working on putting a 440 in my 65 dart for quite a while . When I finally got the first motor in and it had less power than the original 273, sputterd missed and nothing would help. I finally gave up and pulled the motor and built a new motor. I got the new motor in this last weekend, started it up, and water poured out of 2 of the exhaust manifold studs where someone had pulled out the studs and apparently stripped the holes. I figured no problem I will put a helicoil in and be done with it, unfortunatley they were the holes closest to the firewall even the smallest right angle drill wouldn't fit. Took me and a buddy a full day to assmeble the motor and get it in the car, I will tell you the frustration of those water leaks really had me questioning why I was doing this. So I took a couple days off, got a fresh perspective ripped down the motor, I had just put together & installed the helicoil's. Now the reason we do this. I got it running yesterday broke in the cam, no water leaks and everything is great. Drove around for about an hour today at highway speeds varying the RPMs with no problems. Nailed it once or twice and it has more power than I know what do with. Today I am happy and understand the time, money and frustration was all worth it, until tomorrow when the next thing breaks. Remember working on em is 1/2 the fun. I have a sense of pride knowing that all the work was done by me, and if it something does go wrong I can fix it (with a little help from this site). You've got a great resource with this web site! Keep your head up, read up on fixes post a bunch of questions then get a wrench dig in and fix it.