My buddy picked up a 73 88 Royale with a 455. What's a good top end rebuild kit at 10.1 compression with those J heads on that beauty? Thanks either way!!!

 

The J heads have the same 80-ish CC chambers as do nearly every other BBO head. Olds varied CR with the size of the piston dish. You can get some CR back by milling the heads, but doing it right requires new pistons. Your OEM pistons have soup-bowl-sized dishes.

 

Make sure you post some pics. STAT!

 

Shes a beauty. Barn find 60k all original

 

She is going to come back to life!!!

 

What a front end!!!

 

She's going to go from 8.5 compression to 10

 

OHHH YEAHHH!

 

That car needs a lot more than engine work, but a nice acquisition. Good luck with it.

Here's mine. 62,000 miles. No options to speak of. 350 engine. But it moves along smartly.

 

Does it run okay? If so, I'd concentrate on things like bodywork and a new convertible top(!) before I jumped into an engine build.

 

Going to bring her back to life regardless. Pulling the engine this week and finding options for higher compression

 

Okay, well, Joe answered your question -- new flattops!

I'll just say that I personally wouldn't want to spend a bunch of money on mechanicals and then discover the body's rotten.

That said, best of luck with your project.

 

Joe mentioned milling the heads for compression. The deck can also be milled, but don't forget that both will make the angles for your intake manifold off. I'm not sure how much compression you could even get without replacing the soup bowl smog pistons?

Good luck! 👍

 

Since you're destroying the originality of the car, anyway, assuming the engine in it is original and hasn't been modified, why not just take it out and replace it with an earlier Olds V-8 that already has the higher compression you want? Why go through the trouble of modifying the current engine and bringing on all of the potential unforseen headaches that might entail?

Regardless of what you do, when you're done, you're still going to have a boulevard cruiser fit for taking the grandkids to the ice cream shop on sunny Sunday afternoons and not a performance car. If you want to soup up an engine, why not do it in a Cutlass or something similar?

I know some of us on here sound less than fully supportive of what you want to do, but I think we have a good reason. If the engine runs and the car drives, leave that aside for now focus your time and money on getting it in shape cosmetically first. Have you fully investigated what it's going to take to bring it back from the very poor condition it is in now? It wouldn't do much good to get the engine where you want it only to discover that it's in such poor shape body/frame/trim-wise that it's not worth spending the money for that.

 

We don't think she's going to run. If that's the case then a block from 68 to 72 of course. Trying to keep her as original as possible. Going to pull the motor and see what she lookis like inside and go from there.