A buddy of mine has a 350 that I will soon be dropping in my 82 Maro. Hes not much of a gearhead, but remembers that the engine was built with a '260 or 270 sumthin' cam. He says it has a wicked idle. I dont know much about matching up race parts, but Ive heard that you need to match severe cams with the proper torque converter. Im not looking to turn this car into a dragster, just a tire smoking weekend rider. Comments? If I gotta swap that converter Im gonna do it while I do the engine swap...

 

Yea, you are supposed to although if you don't, it's not the end of the world but you won't use your power band necessarily. You could take the cam out and take to a race engine shop and they should have a cam checker and tell you all the specs of it. If you don't want to do that...if it is a street cam, you would probably be fine with a 2800 stall or so which is higher than stock but not crazy wicked....If you want to ever get the engine running the best if you change heads or something, it would help to know the cam though...

 

WTF? Nobody has any suggestions? Maybe Ill run a set of slicked up hot pinup girls in thongs.....OR maybe more than one person can chime in on if I need to replace the converter or not.......

 

This is the first I have heard of this type of match up. The stock converter stalls at about 1650 rpms amd when I changed engines I went with a 2400 stallto take advantage of the new power band range. But my car is a daily driver and higher stall would not suit my needs. Back to your question? The Cam has nothing to do with it and higher stall depends on how you want the car to perform.

 

Once you put in a more powerful engine and use the same converter, youautomaticallt wind up wit a higher stall converter. You are not giving us much to go with since you don't know what you working with. A wicked idle can mean all sorts of things, including a car that is out of tune or even broken. Once you figure out what you have you may get some useful replies