Here's what I built back in 2001. It made 455hp @ 6100 and 435 ft-lbs at 4800.
350 4-bolt main block, bored .020 over
JE Pistons, Teflon coated skirts and Ceramic coated domes, 9.25:1 compression
Cola 4340 crank
Manley 6" H-Beam rods
Comp XR294HR hydraulic roller cam
Comp hydraulic roller lifters
Dart Pro-1 heads, 72cc chambers, 200cc runners, out of the box
Fel Pro 1010 headgaskets (.040" compressed)
Comp Pro-Magnum rockers, 1.6 on intake, 1.5 on exhaust
Dart Stud Girdles
Dart single plane intake manifold, same thing as a super victor (later changed to a Dart dual plane)
Demon 750 carb (started with vacuum secondaries, changed to a double pumper)
M55A oil pump
The engine had a really nasty sounding idle and ran great... from 3000rpm on up. I drove it daily. It was a total dog below 3K rpm and was no fun in my 3620# car until I put a higher stall converter in it which really hurt the street manners. Let's put it this way-- the bottom end was so soft in the original configuration I could NOT powerbrake the car with a 2000 stall GM converter, a 700R4, and 3.42 gears. It simply would not spin! I later changed to an RPM Air-Gap dual plane and it signifacantly helped the bottom end.
In all honesty, being my first "from scratch" build I did the classic bonehead move of over-camming, over-intakeing, and under-compressing. If I built it again I would use a dual plane intake from the start and go with 10.5:1 compression or so which would still be fine on pump gas. I would also like to have tried a Comp XR284HR or equivalent back to back as I think the smaller cam would have suited the 353 cubes better; if the engine was a 383 or 406 the 294 would have been a better match.
It also ran just fine on 87 because of the cam/compression combo. It all worked out in the end though, as the shortblock/heads/compression ratio were just about ideal for boost.
