Updates? Pictures? Come on man...it's been a month, you're killing me!

Actually, reading through this thread has been helping me a lot in regards to stroking my 360 to a 406. Now I'm no mathematical whiz like J20 here, so I'm hoping someone can help me out with this a few things.

1) Assuming a 4.11" bore in the 360 (+0.030"), 3.827" stroke, 6" SBC rod length, and a compression height of 1.29" on the piston I'm getting a scant 0.0045" deck clearance. Dropping back to a 1.275" compression height, I'm still only getting 0.0195" deck clearance.

9.208 - 1.9135 - 6.0 - 1.29 = 0.0045"
9.208 - 1.9135 - 6.0 - 1.275 = 0.0195"

Even adding 0.050" for head gasket thickness only bumps them up to 0.0545" and 0.0695" respectively.

That sure doesn't seem like much deck clearance, and more importantly what will piston-to-valve clearance be like? Shave the deck a little to square things up and you'd really be skinny on clearance.

2) The 360 rod journal width is 1.998 to 2.004", while the 401's is 1.846 to 1.852". Would I have to comensate for this difference in some way, or won't it make a difference? I figure it wouldn't be hard to widen the 401's journals while grinding them down, but is it necessary and will it cause excessive side clearance with the SBC rods? My main concern here is ensuring the rods are centered up in the bores and not in a bind at the crank leading to premature rod bearing failure.

3) Oddly enough, when I plugged this all into a compression ratio calculator using the 33cc dish, 58cc combustion chamber and 0.050" thick head gasket, I cam up with a CR of 9.02:1.

From my understanding, you are removing additional material from the combustion chambers to gain 5cc's of volume for a total of 63cc. According to my calculations, this will net a CR of 8.65:1. Conversely, milling the heads to reduce the combustion chambers by 5cc to yield 53cc's, which by my calculations would result in a 9.43:1 CR.

Am I missing something here? If my calculations are correct (which they may not be), wouldn't it have been much easier to just reduce the piston dish by 5cc rather than working over the heads?