1982 Chevy Pickup - Brute Forcee

With our impossible-to-reach bolt in the head, we lowered it onto the new SCE composition gasket.

Hydraulic cams rely on extra lubrication upon initial start-up. If you don't apply a liberal coating of cam lube to your new cam, it will go bad in no time.

We fabbed up this cheap timing gear installer from some 2-inch steel pipe. It cost about $5.

Yes, this may only be a towing motor, but that's no excuse not to degree it if you have the right tools. We installed the cam straight up, per Crane's recommendation.

Just because you lubed the cam, don't forget to also coat the lifters with cam break-in lube. It could mean the difference between a cam that lasts and a rejected warranty claim.

The 2-inch Hedman headers were the first new parts to go in. We thought this would be easier than slipping them in with the heads in place. It was, but we later found out that torqueing the lower cylinder head bolts was no fun with the headers in place.

Before bolting the new heads on, we chased each head-bolt hole with an ARP thread-cleaning tap and WD-40. We ran the tap down each hole and carefully cleaned up the junk that came out. If you miss this step, we can practically guarantee that your head bolt torque specs will be off.

This is the outside hole that's impossible to get the bolt in once the head's on the block. So we put it in first. It's under the master cylinder and uses the only medium-length bolt on the outside of the cylinder head.

The head-bolt threads get a sealant to keep water from leaking out (high-temp RTV works well here) and the bolt head and washer get ARP's assembly lube for accurate torque readings.

It's important to follow the factory torque sequence on any cylinder head to ensure you spread the torque loads out evenly from the center of the heads. And be sure to smoothly pull, never push or jerk, on the torque wrench for accurate readings.

Big-block Chevy heads use 16 head bolts of various lengths. So why is there only 15 in this photo? The next photo answers that, but pay attention to where each length bolt goes. The four long bolts are for the holes above the raised exhaust ports. The four shortest go below the exhaust; the six medium bolts go in the rocker valley, except for one that goes outside above the end exhaust port, and the two bolts that are just a hair shorter than the six medium bolts go in the shallow holes at the ends of the rocker valley.

We oiled Crane's 1.7:1 Blazer aluminum roller rocker arms and made sure that each pushrod tip had break-in assembly lube on it before we zeroed the valve lash.