I am very near to the complete rebuild of a 1976 Chevy 350.  Here's what i've done so far:

- honed cylinders
- leveled block and heads
- new rings, rods, pistons, 268 cam, bearings, oil pump, water pump, starter...pretty much everything that needed replacing was replaced.
- original crank (tolerances all within spec)
- actually, all tolerances are withing spec.
- the carburetor hasn't been purchased yet, but i've got a holley in mind with about 650-700 cfm of flow.
- 1996 vortec heads with some slight home-made porting.

It's going into my 1979 Z28 camaro with a T5 borg-warner transmission.

now here's the sticking point, i've just bolted on the vortec heads and noticed that my pushrods are off in length.  they are too short.  crap.  how do i solve this one?  is there a standard length for this combination?

thanks  

1996 vortec engines are using hydraulic roller lifters which use shorter pushrods than older flat tapped hydraulic lifter blocks. If you didn't use a roller cam with roller lifters, and i think it's the case here, you shouldn't use pushrods for vortec engines, just use standard (longer) pushrods just like the COMP Cams #7812 pushrod.

I hope this helps you.  

That might be the issue.  Measuring the pushrods i found that they were right on the button @ 7.8 inch, which if i had been using hydraulic roller lifters i would be right on the mark.  However, i wanted to stay on the inexpensive side of things and went with the flat tapped lifters.  I will look into the Comp Cams #7812 pushrod and compare it with the pushrod length that i have calculated to suit my engine buildup.

Furthermore, the parts supplier has talked about reimbursement for the wrongly supplied pushrods; i hope they don't mind getting the used ones back.

thanks again.