1972 C10 ... SoCal

[bs46488]

There were a few reasons I'm doing the swap....
1) I posted the engine and trans combo for sale....and it sold 36 hours later. I told myself if it didn't sell then the swap is a no go.
2) I want to drive my truck to work 1 or 2 days a week during summer. At the time I pulled the motor it was getting 4 MPG. So my 42 mile round trip drive to work would be about 10 gallons of gas for each trip.
3) Almost every side of the big block leaked.
4) Starting the motor was questionable at times. Sometimes it would fire up, some times it would just crank.
5) According to my wife it was loud and smelled, so she would not ride in it.

All said and done it will probably cost me $300 over the sale of the big block and will solve all the items above. A factory 300hp, ~20mpg drop in motor that I can get parts for at my local parts store seemed like a good fit for my application.


I have a set of CPP engine stands then I used some ebay adapter plates with regular SBC motor mounts. I think I put them on the second hole from the front. I can easily fit my entire arm between the back of the cylinder head and the firewall, so there is a lot of room to move this back if you wanted. I am trying to utilize the truck AC motor so I fit the motor mounts to the AC bracket. The AC motor bolts right in and fits between the frame. I'm just going to get some 90degree adapters for the hard lines.



I went with the 1 3/4 Speed Engineering long tube headers. Great fit, just had some tweaking to do on the factory trans hard lines. You can see the firewall clearance from this pic.