If you want 10's all day, then you need to build the car as if you were going for low 9's, and it will survive. Your engine is ok but it would be a good 11 second engine to keep it reliable. The tranny needs quite a bit more work if you want to always run 10's. If you only want to kiss the 10's once in a while then you should be fine, but these engines can be grenades with just a minor mistake, and sometimes everything can be perfect and still grenade. bison did a car a while ago that was a stock lower end and it did low 10's beautifully, until one of the pistons cracked. If you want to build the car to what you want, then write everything down first, gather the parts you need within your budget, and build the car you want. Doing it piece meal will cost more and aggravate you to the point of getting out of it.
hey! thanks for the advice. That's what i'm in the process of doing now except i'm not writing everything out for the car as a whole. I'm approaching it from different angles, such as getting suspension sorted out, followed by, fuel, then brakes, electrical, so on and so forth. Since I don't daily drive the car, it's not too frustrating to me to have the car down for a while. I did recognize the transmission was a weak link the moment I pulled it off the truck, so last week, I purchased an Extreme Automatics Stage III transmission. Now, while I wait for that, I am going to build the rear suspension.
Everyone is saying just drop in some cheap shocks and leave the springs alone, but I'm on the same page as what you are saying. I want to build this car for what I want it to do, not for what it can do now, and if it means, saving up a little more money for adjustable this, or variable that, then I don't really mind. In my eyes, suspension is the foundation for quickness, so I do not want to take shortcuts in this department.