New member w/ Cougar

I just joined this forum today hoping to find some advice on my current project, my 1978 Cougar. I'm from Northern Texas and this is my first project. I've had the car for about 4 months now and I've completely disassembled the engine, now I'm looking for either good OEM replacements or reliable budget upgrades! This is my first Ford but not my first car. Im 19 in January so I don't have nearly as much experience as anyone else here but I love to learn!

Thanks for all the comments! I didn't want to open with too much but I'm more than happy to list more information about it.

Its a 1978 car, built in Ohio, shipped and sold in Pennsylvania where it was owned for around 3 decades. It was then brought to Florida for a short period of time, and it was last registered in 2016 here in Texas. The car has under 53,000 original miles. I found this out using an online VIN lookup and was surprised how few miles it has, let alone the fact it has no rust holes except the battery tray and one in the middle of the firewall. The engine is the original 5.8 351W and it has the less common FMX tranny. At some point the owner swapped out the original standard gauge cluster for XR-7 gauges. The factory trim spec for the car is the Brougham spec, but at some point the vinyl was ripped off hence the brown roof but thankfully that seemed to prevent structural rust.

The reason I tore down the engine was because at first I thought it had a blown head gasket (ended up being wrong about that lol) and also the fact that the oil filter was torqued to the moon and back, so the only way I personally was going to remove it was with the engine out. Now everything looked fine while getting the top end off, but when I got to the rod bearings some of them were down to the copper and some of the lifters were slightly mushroomed, making me fight them pulling them out. I also had no idea how the engine or car was treated during its life, and the guy I bought it from never even drove the car so I never met the true owner(s).

The only thing I have left to take off is the main caps and crank but I've had to postpone it because of a nasty infection on my foot and now got a procedure done. So once its all bare I'll send it out and get it cleaned and checked for cracks because 1 of the freeze plugs had some rust around it, but it wasn't popped out. I'm hoping everything goes smoothly and then it'll be time to throw everything together once I can get some advice on a cam!