Good Restification advice regardless of brand......

While each car line-Chevy,Ford, Mopar, etc has their individual characteristics-there are some general guidelines that will save you money and give you maximum bang for the buck regardless of what your restoring. # 1. The saying-"There's no substitute for cubic inches, except cubic dollars" Is still true. Unless your restoring a classic with a small engine-i.e. a Boss 302 Mustang, or a '69 Z/28 with a 302 Chevy-always build the biggest motor you can afford. Often the larger engine costs no more to buy or build, yet either stock or modified, makes substantially more power. Some examples-a 350 Chevy makes way more power than a 305. A 400 Pontiac makes way more power than a 350. A 360 Mopar makes a lot more power than a 318. On the other hand-I said biggest motor you can AFFORD. Don't scrap a perfectly good 383 Chrysler and then spend an extra 5 grand that you don't really have, buying and building a junk 440.  Stroker cranks are all the rage now, and more cubes equals more power. This is fine if the engine in question needed the crank, rods and pistons replaced anyway. But what if you had a perfectly good running 400 Pontiac-good compression on all cylinders, good oil pressure, doesn't smoke or use a drop of oil. Instead of trying to make it into a 455, I'd take the $1699 that the stroker rotating assembly costs and buy a hot cam,an Edelbrock intake and carb, a set of headers, and maybe some gears and traction bars to put all that power to the ground. The extra power you get from those mods is going to be a lot more than you'd get with just the cubes. See what I'm saying?  # 2. Bigger is not always better. Just because some intake or cam made the most peak hp on a dyno doesn't mean it's going work well in a street-driven car. In 99% of applications I'd recommend a dual-plane manifold and a vacuum-secondary carb. Double-Pumper Holleys and single-plane intakes are ok on a steeply geared, light car with a stick-if you pop the clutch at 3 grand on up, it's not going to bog-but on a car with an automatic-that you can't rev up at the line to clean out, you need a carb that idles and launches cleanly-i.e.-a properly prepped Quadrajet or Edelbrock. Plus, every time you look at the throttle the mechanical secondarys and dual accelerator pumps open-it's like flushing a toilet. Your gas mileage will be horrific-I mean like 5-8 mpg instead 12-14. The same goes for camshaft selection. Especially on a car with an automatic transmission and high ( low numeric ) gearing it's better to err on the conservative side. Manual trans applications are more forgiving because idle quality isn't as important-you can launch at whatever rpm you want. And engine size makes a difference too. For example the old standby- the "350 hp 327 Corvette cam" will absolutely ruin a 305 Chevy. However this same cam will work pretty good in a 350 and be really sweet in a 383 or 400. The reason being that the larger engines have more torque to begin with, so losing a little bottom end in exchange for a lot more mid-range and top-end is acceptable. The 305 didn't have enough torque to lose, so the big cam just kills the small motor. You need to be cautious on big-blocks too. For example I would only recommend the Vaunted Ram Air IV cam for a 400 Pontiac if the car had a 4-speed and 3.73 gears. However, I know people that get awesome performance with this cam while running 3.08 or 3.23 gears and an automatic behind a 455. The 55 extra cubes really smooths out this radical cam. # 3. Consider "Bang for the Buck" before you spend big dollars. Aftermarket aluminum heads are all the rage, and in some cases they are a great deal. In other cases not. For example-Hot Rod magazine did a cylinder head test on a 454 Chevy a few years ago-the standard oval-port heads vs the rectangular port high-performance heads. The hi-perf heads did not show a noticeable gain until 6,300 rpm!  How often are you going to above 6,200 rpm in your street / strip machine? Edelbrock makes performance aluminum heads for just about everything; however, for anything other than a small-block Chevy they cost close to 2 grand a pair. For 2 grand you could buy a carb/intake combo, a cam, headers,a higher stall converter and some stiffer gears. Ditto for overdrive transmissions. These swaps cost anywhere from 2-5 thousand dollars. For 600 less rpm on the freeway?!  Again that money could better spent elsewhere.  Mastermind