351 Cleveland Rebuild

Background
Specifications

The Bottom End:

The Top End:

The Transmission:

Credits:

The Block and Bottom End:
The Timing Set

Timing sets usually consist of two gears and a chain. Full Roller timing chains are best, and that's what I ran on my last rebuild. Unfortunately, chains wear out and become slack. Mine was no exception. There is an alternative. A Gear Drive assembly. This consists of the crank gear and cam gear, similar to before, but also includes a driver and idler gear that sit between. There is no chain involved. Typically these drives are more noisy, but Pete Jackson has created a "quiet" drive set that is supposed to be a bit less noisy. We'll see.

	This is the new thrust plate assembly I'm going to be using. It consists of two sets of Torrington bearings and a new thicker, machined relief thrust plate. One set of bearings goes between the cam and thrust plate, the other between the thrust plate and the cam timing gear. NOTE: a regular cam timing gear will need to be machined in order to accept this bearing thrust kit. The Pete Jackson gear drive, for whatever reason, is already machined to accept this setup. They include a bronze thrust washer that must be used if you DON'T use a bearing set.
I'll get a better photo of this later. This is the cam gear of the new Pete Jackson setup. The bronze bushing (washer) is shown here as well. For my application, I will not need this washer, as the cam gear (without the washer) meets the machining requirements of the bearing thrust set.
	Now before we get too excited about putting the tining set into the block, we needed to drill a .030 hole in the drivers side lifter galley plug. This photo makes it very hard to see, but in the middle of this plug is a small hole. Oil will weep through this hole and drip onto the distributor gear assembly. We made this mod to help prolong the life of the distributor gear.
Here, the new Pete Jackson cam gear is in place. Notice the smooth flat face of the gear. This posed a very perplexing problem with regards to the fuel pump eccentric. The stock setup would no longer fit correctly so we had to do something new. We'll cover that in our next page.