With Halloween right around the corner, I figured I’d trick and treat Hemmings Blog enthusiasts with a scary story and frightful photos. So here goes, my pretties: These are the before photos of the 350 I’m building for my truck. AHHHH, THE HORROR!

That look of dread in the disassembly photo must’ve washed over my face when I started thinking about handing my Visa card over to the guys at the machine shop. I mean, I’ve had a tetanus shot, so it couldn’t have been that.

The engine wasn’t this ghastly when I acquired it. But I dumped it out in the creepy, dark woods at the edge of my property on a pallet, poorly entombed in a tarp. This was right about the time we started building the new house we currently haunt. After the McNessor Manse was finished, I then bought another project and another engine to rebuild. More time passed, etc., etc.

The 350 became a sanctuary for crawly creatures of the woodland, the smallest of which apparently slithered inside the exhaust ports, squeezed past an open valve and made a nest on top of a piston.

Anyway, just for cackles, I figured I’d run this pile of small-block gore past the dudes over at the machine shop here in Bennington to see if it could be resurrected from the grave.

Their reaction? (And here’s the REALLY frightening part): “Big deal. We’ve seen way worse.”

Spooooooooky, no?

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