I’m not doing the rebuild just for the cam - I bought this motor , used, and ran it in another’s boat for last 12 years. It’s always run well for me, but there has always been a lot of ‘blowby’ smoke coming up through the valve covers and routed back to the flame arrester. Never bothered me so much when the motor was 10+ feet behind me in an engine room. But in this boat it’s more of a problem, when I get off the boat, I have the smell of burning oil exhaust.
So while I’m got it torn down for new rings and bearings, doesn’t make much sense to reuse the 25 year old cam. I believe my 350 mag is rated at 300 hp.
My machine shop guy is a boater, and seems to know what he’s talking about. I told him i want to boost low rpm torque, don’t really care much about max rpm or speed. Told him I was thinking about replacing the crank to make it a stroker, upgrading to vortec heads, or perhaps both. The vortec heads is a good upgrade, but I would have to replace my intake. So far both the local machine shop and speed shop have told me not to dump my intake, which is a cast version of the z28 gm intake; supposedly it’s a good one. He told me the stoker upgrade is a nice one, but really pays off in the top end. So probably not a great choice. He said my best bet is to up my cam a bit, and gave me the name of a guy who will tune my carb to match the motor. But he didn’t have any specifics yet on the cam. And he was more used to building ‘go fast’ motors with performance exhaust.