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Bearings
Pontiac V8 Bearings
Three Sets, One Bottom End — Bearings for Pontiac V8s
A Pontiac V8 needs three sets of bearings to go back together: mains, rods and cams. They are the parts that decide whether the bottom end lives at 4,500 rpm on a Sunday drive or 6,500 rpm at the strip, and they are sized to the crankshaft you actually have — not to the engine on the fender tag.
Butler stocks Clevite, Federal Mogul, King Racing and Dura-Bond, split into cam bearings, main bearings by journal size, and rod bearings by brand. Standard through .030 and .040 undersizes are on the shelf, along with extra-clearance sets for engines that want more oil at the bearing.
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More About Bearings
1. The three families and how this section is split
Every Pontiac rebuild buys all three. They are browsed differently because they are chosen differently.
| Cam bearings | Chosen by year and by cam journal size. The 1959-62 Pontiac and the 1963-79 Pontiac do not use the same set, and aftermarket blocks may be machined for a larger bearing entirely. |
| Main bearings | Chosen by main journal diameter, which is why they are split into 301, 326-350-389-400 and 421-428-455 groups. |
| Rod bearings | Chosen by rod journal diameter, then by brand and series — Clevite, Federal Mogul and King Racing each have their own pages here. |
2. Size to the crank, not to the engine
The single most common ordering mistake in this whole section is buying standard bearings for a crank that has already been turned.
| Measure first | Mains and rods are stocked standard and in .010, .020, .030 and .040 undersizes. If the crank has been ground, the bearing has to match the grind, and a used crank of unknown history needs to be miked before anything is ordered. |
| Extra clearance sets | Several lines are offered with .001" extra clearance built into the bearing. Clevite marks that with an X in the part number; King and Federal Mogul offer their own extra-clearance and reduced-clearance sets. That is a build decision, not a size decision. |
| Buy the set | Mains and rods here are sold as sets for the engine, not as individual shells. |
3. Picking a line
Butler's own product copy is blunt about this: Butler Performance uses only the highest quality bearings made by Clevite 77 and Federal Mogul, and it has added King Racing for the harder-use end.
| Tri-metal | The traditional answer for a street or street/strip Pontiac. Clevite's tri-metal construction uses a soft lead-alloy outer layer over a copper-lead center on a steel back. |
| Harder-face options | King's HP series was developed for applications that want a material harder than a babbitt top layer, and it also suits nodular cast iron crankshafts on the street and strip. |
| Cam bearing coatings | Dura-Bond offers coated and uncoated Pontiac cam bearings, including an oversized outside diameter version for blocks whose cam bores have been machined for it. |
If the crank is out and measured, a counter call takes about two minutes. Give us the journal sizes and the rpm the engine will actually see, and the right three boxes go in the same order.
Not sure what your Pontiac needs?
Email our tech team at tech@butlerperformance.com. Tell us your engine, heads, car, and power goal, and we will put the parts together as one combination that works.