My head is pounding now! Or is that me pounding my head with a hammer. Remind me who I are again!

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2 Mopars come with Spark plug tubes. One is a world class, racing machine. The other is a 426 CI. boat anchor!

12.70 @ 104.6

That's what I was going to say.....

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Ed
64 Valiant 225 / 904 / 42:1 manual steering / 9" drum brakes

There would have to be some kind of interlocking seal that could take some extreme steam pressure....I have personally witnessed a head on an other brand engine with a hairline crack get overworked and leaned out enough to get the water in the head to turn to steam and finish the job the crack started...it sounded like a hand grenade and luckily no one was standing on the passenger side of the car...it was messy and would have been deadly.

The next issue would be if both pieces warped at different rates due to the combustion chamber taking a heating and beating and the upper valve train and cooling passages how would you get them straight enough to mate again?

I hadn't thought of that. I think a billet head with bored cooling passages and plugs might be a better choice, but more expensive.

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Casually looking for a Clifford hyperpak intake for cheap.

http://www.dieselpowermag.com/tech/dodg ... 3568010468

http://www.dieselpowermag.com/tech/dodg ... der_heads/

saw this at the Indy PRI show this past december,,
for prices: the guy in the booth said in the neighborhood of 10K for a complete head ready to bolt on.
notice the steel tubes in the bolt holes,, those are called compression limiters. The through holes are finished to a fine tolerance diameter, then the tubes are pressed in,, allows one to put a good amount of clamp load on with out deforming the aluminum

You could cast a cylinder head shaped blank and then mill it. The difficult task for an amateur is building and handling a furnace and crucible that can pour 35 pounds of aluminum ( just a guess on the weight ). A #10 crucible can handle about 10 pounds of aluminum, a decent size for a hobby furnace. If you had a partner with another modest sized furnace then the two could each supply half the metal.

Billet is expensive, but if you sourced used pistons from engine builders, you might be frugal. This scheme is for a prototype rather than a production run, there are ways to cut the cost if you are resourceful. Of course this is after having mastered the basic foundry arts.

I wouldn't worry too much about the water cores as you can cut the top off a slant six head and use the cavities as a guide for making a pattern. Traditionally a grain based binder was used, think of oatmeal mixed with sand, run a wire through it and bake it until its as crispy as an overcooked biscuite. The wire keeps the baked core from floating when the metal is poured. Men with a 6th grade education produced many of these OEM heads, not to say that they weren't smart, but it was a dirty job.

The man I bought my '47 Dodge truck from was taught from his youth the foundry arts, making patterns etc. He said don't be afraid to fail, you will make mistakes but its not that difficult. He completed some production designs for a company called Hot Heads.

I'd just like to add that the head should be gluten-free.

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一期一会
Too many people who were born on third base actually believe they've hit a triple.

DadTruck, you might or might not have been at the Slant racers banquet a year ago or so when I brought one of my raw cast aluminum race cylinder heads up to show how viable it would be for me to modify my existing patterns and make it a Slant specific head.

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There's no such thing as too much cam....only not enough engine!

In many of the old foundry books grain was used as a water soluble binder. Patterns were made from wood. I don't think anyone uses grain anymore, but organic materials are still used.

mid 70's to late 90's I was one of those foundry rats,, brings back memories,,

a portion of that time was as a Manufacturing Engineer responsible for process development for the production of I6 heads.

* the thought of using cut up casting sections as core boxes is technically a dead end,, core boxes, even those for hand ramming the sand have finely finished walls and positive draft to allow the cores to release, casting surfaces would need to be smoothed and re worked to the extent it would be easier to build new, there would also need to add core print areas

* the core sand type that used a organic binder,, is oil sand,, the foundry I was in used wood flour,, that process also needs dryer trays that approximate the shape through the core post cure process, not the best for dimensional stability. Newer more stable process available today.

* the wires in the core add stability to the core pre and post cure, wire cannot possibly add enough weight to prevent core float,, chaplets and core prints are used for that.

* concerning the 6th grade education,, lot of hard work in the foundry business,, has been removed through automation,, but then as now successful casting is all about process control over a vast array of variables and understanding interactions. I had huge success with using Taguchi Designed Experiments to identify important process variables and to prove out interactions and Statistical Process Control to keep a handle on the process's that influenced the product

but going to manufacturing a new slant six head,, if someone really wanted to do that today they would use the 3D printing technology. Not as simple as it sounds, but basically, CAD design the internal hard sand cores and external, hard sand mold, 3D print the sand cores, add a gating system and pour the metal. No need for core boxes and a pattern.
This is done today for one off prototype castings,

an alternative to the computer generated math data and 3D printer is to use the Lost Foam process.

Here you create the actual shape of the product desired in foam,
here it would be a slant six head, with all the internal and external features whittled from foam. No CAD data, no 3D printer
GM was heavily into lost foam casting in the 90's. GM being in volume serial production used precision molds to produce the foam parts then assembled them. For a one off slant six head, you could whittle or cnc mill the shapes out of bulk foam, then assemble them.

this link has details..large scale volume operation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost-foam_casting

this link has details on a back yard low volume operation
http://www.buildyouridea.com/foundry/lo ... howto.html

doing an aluminum head would be a mix of the two.

I would only consider using a cut up head to build the patterns, to see how Chrysler did it. I'm sure the technique could be improved today. My thinking is only a dozen or so heads would be produced. The engineer that I bought my '47 truck from used traditional methods to produce parts for 1950s Hemi motors. He also makes castings for personal use. His father taught him foundry work. He is an all around craftsman. I'd actually prefer an iron head, but I'm probably one of a few. I think the best design would be how Chrysler might have updated the slant six had they kept it in production through the '90s, changes to the combustion chambers for a 150 horsepower workhorse rather than a hot rod. Maybe raised ports, likely have carb clearance issues on some uses, but okay for EFI. Then why do all that for just 150 HP? It would be a better base for modifications and also allow higher static compression ratio on 87 octane for improved torque and economy.

Even making the patterns the old fashioned way takes a lot of specialized knowledge and skill that is often overlooked and not realized. While cutting up some old heads can give you a general idea of certain things, its the unseen or undetectable details that often lead to failure or unusable castings. One thing that has to be accounted for is the shrink allowance of the aluminum has to be factored into the pattern size as well as the extra material added to all the areas that get machined. Patterns for parts to be cast in aluminum need to be about 2-3% longer, thicker and wider on all the features being cast or the casting will not fit on the intended block because it will shrink beyond its intended sizes due to the shrink allowance not being taken into consideration. So if you took an existing cylinder head and tried to use it as a pattern, once you poured the aluminum and it cooled, the finished casting would be about .300" shorter than the head you used as the pattern.

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There's no such thing as too much cam....only not enough engine!

Seems like a machine ready billet blank would be the best way to go, rather than casting. Just have to figure out the machining CNC part. No telling what that would cost, but as a starting point it takes a lot of upfront work out of the equation. One could scan an existing head for the CNC parameters, modify/simplify as desired, or am I dreaming? I'm not a CNC person, but it seems like they can machine just about anything out of a block of material. It doesn't have to be as artful, curvy or beautiful as a factory head, basically a block of metal with the correct mating surfaces, ports and such (like most aftermarket Al heads look). Once programmed, figured out, the cost could be lowered by batch orders.

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I think CNC would be an easy way to take modern combustion chamber design and put it on a slant head. I just cringe at the though of what a block of aluminum the size of a slant six head would cost and then what the custom machining woudl cost on top of that. A lot of work could be done to a stock cast iron head for the cost of a new custom CNC milled aluminum head.

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Casually looking for a Clifford hyperpak intake for cheap.

I just had a short conversation with someone who knows a lot about this stuff. He said you can't beat casting for price; it's essentially based on the cost of the bulk material. Once you have your molds it's like 10-25% more than the cost of the bulk material; closer to 10% if you have it done in China (with extreme oversight of course).

brian

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