well I wasn't planning on upgrading the motor just yet but I guess now is the time... I had a small oil leak so I took it to have it looked at and unfortunately he found some problems, the crank was scored, then found the bearings were shot, camshaft damaged too, also found when the previous owner had the motor worked on they put the main caps in the incorrect order and were loose(which probably caused most of the issues)... so to say the least there is a lot of things that will need to be done to fix the issues. if it was the original 396 block I would just have it rebuilt and fixed but since its not I'm not to worried about it...
so after some debating I'm upgrading the engine to a crate 502... the motor just came in and hoping to start installing it next week. some pics below... more to come. I cant wait till it gets installed...