Making power in a 289

[Rev]

Looks like you understand what needs to be done pretty well. Compression for a street engine using pump gas should end up at about 9.5/1 or maybe even 10/1 but not higher. Mine is about 9.5/1.

Blue printing is just meticulous measuring, machining, and assembly of the engine. It requires perfect bore allignment of the crank journals, squaring the decks with the crank, boring and honing the cylinders with torque plates bolted on, and internally balancing the engine. There's tons of other stuff involved (whole books are written on the subject).

As long as your engine has an oil supply to the lifter bores, you can use a hydraulic lifter cam. I'm pretty sure all 289's had that oil supply. You may want to run a roller cam if it's within the budget. Comp Cams and Crane offer kits. I think the hooker long tubes (1 5/8" primaries) would work well for you.

The main thing to watch out for in a street car is building an engine set up as a race engine. You will want lots of low end torque and crisp throttle response at relatively low RPMs. That means not too big of a cam, carb, ports, or headers. The main thing is to keep the components "matched" or at least compatible. Edelbrock and Holley make matched kits (heads, cam, induction) for a no brainer good combo. What you don't want for the street is an engine that only shines at high RPM and is a dog everywhere else.

You should be able to get pretty good advice from a machine shop that does a lot of high performance Ford small blocks. That's where I got good advice when I did mine to begin with.

Rev