CHEAP 454 UPGRADE

I am building a budget 1935 Ford truck rat rod and wondered if you could help with some basic engine mods. I have a complete running 1973 big-block Chevy truck chassis with all the components. What would be the cheapest and most direct route to wake this engine up? I’m looking more for torque than big horsepower. I know this was the low point on the performance scale but it was too good of a deal to pass up. It has a Turbo 400 and 4.10:1 rear gears.

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Three keywords here: “running”, “budget”, and “torque”. We are assuming the engine is basically sound—a complete rebuild anytime soon isn’t in the cards—and you want to run what you have with a minimum investment. A 1973 truck 454 was typically factory-rated 240 hp at 4,000 rpm and 355 lb-ft of torque at 2,800 rpm. (These are SAE J1349 “net” power ratings, a more conservative test standard than SAE J607 typically used to rate traditional muscle car engines and even now still the standard for “hot rod” and racing engine dyno-testing). Assuming the engine is stock, the key bottleneck is a weak 8.2:1 factory static compression ratio (and that’s optimistic; a non-blueprinted engine can be ½ to ¾ of a point lower than its official rating). Low-compression mills don’t respon