Steveo3318,
After building my engines for street, getting some things right, some things wrong I've got this advice for you.
1. Be honest with yourself about how you are going to drive it and build an engine that suits that type of driving. You ain't going through the quarter mile in a 10 second car that gets 20 mpg using 87 octane gas.
2. The exhaust system on my 57 with a stock 390 and stock heads, cam, intake and exhaust manifolds sounds better than my 63 with long duration high overlap cam, higher compression, aluminum intake, bigger valves and full length headers and 2 1/2' exhaust with crossover. So if you want it to sound mean, you can do it without the lope of a high overlap cam and big exhaust system.
3. Comp cams peddles cams for low compression engines. Most of the big Fords used large LSA cams to deliver performance with higher compression engines. Seek advice from more Cam Manufactors than Comp Cams.
4. Understand that the advice you get online comes from varied back grounds. One guy can tell you to a thousands what his car will do through the quarter mile if he inflates his rear tires one more PSI. Others may use thier cars for converstation pieces and not be able to honestly tell you if it would make it through the quarter mile. RESEARCH, RESEARCH, RESEARCH.
5. If you're going to drive it more on the street at lower rpm's, don't get a stall converter that locks up at 3000 rpm. Stay about 200 rpm lower than your cruise rpm.
6. Learn to use a calculator, find out what DCR means before you buy a cam or decide what compression and horsepower you want. Figure out where you want your cruise rpm and don't buy a cam that has a high peak torque rpm if you don't want to be shifting at 6500 rpm to make horsepower.
7. Don't build a 450 horsepower engine and expect to use a stock cooling system. The more BTU's you make, the more cooling capacity you need. Think before you build.
These are things I learned from not thinking. Jim