In this day and age, when everyone seems to be going "green," I realized that I've actually been recycling for years without even knowing it. Heck, I always thought I was just cheap. What I'm referring to is my penchant for never passing up on the chance to save a perfectly good running engine from the trash heap.
For example, not long ago, my pal and Street Rodder publisher Tim Foss mentioned he had an old, greasy, but running small-block Chevy he'd love to get out from behind the garage. Well, never being one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I instantly agreed to swap that resting place behind his garage for a perfectly good resting place behind mine, and swung by and scooped up the less-than-lovely hunk of iron. And, true to my word, I took it home and unceremoniously plopped it in its new resting place among the rest of my cast-iron castoffs.
Recently, while diggin' around that stash of car goodies (also referred to by Candy as that big pile of sh- on the side of the house), looking for an old Saginaw four-speed Rob Fortier (my best friend and Classic Trucks editor) needed for one of his many projects, I spied the aforementioned small-block-which, of course, was blocking easy access to said transmission. Well, after successfully retrieving the trans, and surprisingly an old Hurst shifter assembly for it, I decided that instead of moving the engine back to its original resting place, I'd drag it around to the garage and maybe actually do something with it. I knew it had been a good runner and figured a few hours of inspection and elbow grease may very well yield a decent powerplant for either a yet-undetermined project or possibly be a source of some swap meet cash.
A quick perusal of related parts from the same parts stash revealed an early Chevy cast-iron intake, a good Rochester four-barrel, a '57 Chevy oil-bath air cleaner, an old points-style distributor, and a pair of matching early-style valve covers. Heck, if I just added a gasket set and a few cans of engine enamel, I might be able to, as the old saying goes, make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, creating a neat, stock-looking early small-block clone while doing my part as a hot rod recycler at the same time. So, let's take a look at what an afternoon's worth of time and a couple rattle cans can accomplish.
The object of my attention was this less-than-photogenic 350 Chevy I'd snagged from my pal, Tim. The engine came from, I believe, a mid-'70s Suburban and was a decent runner when it was pulled. It spent quite a few months under a tarp out behind his garage before he offered it to me, and then an equal amount of time in my collection of cast-offs and orphaned car parts. | 
The early oil-bath air cleaner I used came from another friend here at the magazine, John Barkley (it was the original from his '57 Chevy). The valve covers were a $20 swap meet find from the last Goodguys show up in Pleasanton. | 
As I said earlier, the 350 was a good runner that just needed a bath and a bit of a cosmetic makeover. After doing a compression and leak-down test, and a quick bearing check with some Plasti-Gauge, I determined it was more than worthy of a bit of attention. My aim was to clone a stock-looking early 283/327 with no or little chrome, just Chevy orange and black. |
A putty knife, three cans of engine degreaser, a 1,500-psi pressure washer, and about an hour out of a Saturday afternoon produced a squeaky clean starting point for the makeover. | 
After the bath, I turned my attention to the '57 Chevy air cleaner. Its big, bulbous look appealed to me, but its oil-bath design was something I thought would be better to do without. | 
A quick search through one of my parts cabinets turned up an el-cheapo 6-inch-diameter air cleaner assembly I thought I'd use to convert the oil-bath to a paper element. I initially thought I'd use the filter's base, cutting out the floor of the oil-bath housing and welding in the one from the chrome one. The paper filter base had a large opening for use with a modern four-barrel like a Holley or Edelbrock; however, the Rochester I'd be using had a smaller diameter, so I scrapped that idea. It worked to my advantage, though. I just tossed the small base and set the paper element right on the floor of the large air cleaner, dropped on the small chrome top, and snugged it down using a length of 1/4-20 all-thread. |
The oil-bath air cleaner lid was then dropped right back down into place and snugged down with a second wing nut, hiding the paper filter inside its confines-easy as pie. | 
Next, I cleaned up the cast-iron Chevy four-barrel intake and oil filler tube and gave 'em a coat of primer and Chevy orange engine enamel. | 
I also painted the distributor hold-down and thermostat housing, as well as dropping on the Rochester and newly modified air cleaner, just to see how it looked. |
The early Chevy valve covers were treated to a couple minutes in the blasting cabinet to remove their multiple coats of old paint so I could re-prime and repaint 'em. Here, you can see a before-and-after shot. | 
With the old layers of paint removed and a dent or two pounded out, the next step was a couple coats of primer. | 
After the primer was dry, I sprayed the center portions of each valve cover with a few coats of gloss-black engine enamel. |
Once the black was thoroughly dry, I then laid a strip of 2-inch painter's tape over the Chevrolet script and pressed it down so the script showed through the tape crisply. | 
Next, I dug around until I found my razor knife and trimmed the tape at the edges of the script. This protected the black from the soon-to-be-shot Chevy orange. | 
This part of the process was by far the most time-consuming of the makeover, second only to the cleaning and de-greasing phase. |
After a couple coats of orange, I carefully peeled away the painter's tape, revealing the shiny black Chevrolet script. Looks pretty good, eh? |  | 
Aside from one more valve cover to complete and the installation of the early point-style distributor, the once forlorn small-block is lookin' pretty darn good. A bit more work and a little more detailing, and I'll have a neat-lookin' stock-style engine. Maybe I'll even have to build a car around it-what do you think? |