With everyone complaining about the economy, sometimes you have to take an unusual route to high horsepower. We did just that a few weeks ago. We had a high-mileage ’73 passenger car 350 sitting in our storage shed. It ran fine, if not powerfully, and we wanted to see if we could make it into a player.

Let’s face it—who doesn’t have one of these kicking around their garage, shed, etc. Because they were such low-po engines, they were typically not abused and would run forever. Upon teardown, the short-block seemed to be in great shape, passing our leakdown test with flying colors, though the cam bearings were shot.

We used the Trick Flow Specialties 445-Horsepower top end kit, which gives you 195cc Trick Flow heads with a 64cc combustion chamber, and a hydraulic roller cam, among other things. To this we added an Edelbrock Air Gap intake and a Barry Grant Demon 750 cfm mechanical secondaries carb.

This engine was rated at 175 horsepower stock (net) and though it was said to be 8.5:1 compression, the four eyebrows in the piston and seeing how far down in the chamber they were leads us to think it was more like 8:1. That means even with the 64cc chamber heads, we could still run this brute on 87 octane fuel—a real plus in this day and age.

How’d we do? Well, we’re not going to spoil the party yet, but let’s just say we more than doubled the stock output. Way more. To get the full scoop, check out the November 2008 issue of Super Chevy, on sale on newsstands September 23.