Depending on the clearances and how you use the engine you will probably be fine. In a street and mild race application you should be fine with up to .003 clearnace. You may have to go to a heat treated bearing to find a non fully grooved main bearing for a FE. We have added tangs to the blocks and used 351C/SVO main bearings before to get the clearance we want. Good luck, Keith
F-M 125M is a race bearing with a 3/4 groove - I use this one in virtually all of my build where possible. The ACL bearing line has a half groove bearing that will work for you in the 351C passenger service series. I often use Cleveland bearings in my FE builds to set clearances. Simply remove the tangs - they are an assembly aid only and serve no other purpose. New OEM engines do not have the tangs at all, nor did the bearings we custom made for various NASCAR teams.
You'll find that the price of the race bearing is nearly the same as the passenger car part.
The reason that is because I set race pricing to a fair market price based on comparable products while I was running the Speed-Pro division. I could not control passenger car pricing - - which is set by computer with minimal regard for rational part by part pricing.
The race bearings have a "burnt appearance" due to the lack of a tin overplate. All copper/lead bearings today - no matter who made them - are sintered. A series of blended metal powders are essentially melted onto a prepared steel backing. Copper or nickel layers are used to promote adhesion between "unfriendly" alloy blends. The final layer of light silver colored tin is used to improve cosmetics and shelf life - neither characteristic is important in a performance application. Removing the tin eliminates variability in bearing overplate thickness and prevents tin contamination of the overplate layer, which would reduce fatigue strength. Ugly is better....
The race bearings also have a unique metallurgy for greater load carrying capacity. Race bearings are perfectly suitable in normal street use - recently a couple HD diesel manufacturers have gone to using the race alloy in production to get the added strength.
