Hot Rod magazine, March, page 16. Assuming all true, it looks like a water-heated, draw-thru two barrel setup. The intake, however, appears to lend itself to an efi & throttle body setup rather well.

Doug, if you would, opine what you think about this. By chance, did you know of the existence of such pieces?

The pics aren't the best, but sometimes ya gotta work with what you have.

Roger

I have talked to the owner of these parts before, he wants to build an all Aluminum Turbo SL6

Most of my interest was in the turbo exhaust manifold, that lay-out has me working on a new exhaust manifold concept, this would really help the whole Turbo conversion effort by making the Turbo mounting as easy as buying a new exhaust manifold and grabbing a junkyard turbo.

The Alm. head was of some interest but outside of having a closed combustion chamber, it is the same as all other later SL6 head designs. (except for being aluminum) There is way more we can do to the SL6 head to get it up to today's "current thinking" as far as head design and flow.
DD

Hi Doc,

Can you elaborate a little more on the Au head? Is someone casting Au heads? Or is this just a 'one-off' type deal? If someone has the molds, etc, can we help them out (financially or whatever)?

More details please,

thanks,
mark

I have had a nice design "on paper" for many years. I have quoted it twice, once in 1992 and again in 1999. The "numbers" just do not work-out, all the needed tooling would cost around $20,000.00
DD

Doug, $20,000 is a very reasonable cost for cylinder head patterns. I believe most slant six owners wouldn't pay much more than about $1,200 for a finished casting w/o valve hardware, a few racers would pay much more than double that! To make the project practical the average \6 hobbiest would have to pay a bit more than I think I can afford ( the $1,200 ). If you make the head only for racers you might not sell enough sets to break even.

Even so, $20,000 sounds very attractive, I think you could easily invest double that much. The time that a pattern maker would have to spend is a major barrier, it would almost be a full time job and you would probably have to go through several revisions to get the bugs out.

I sure hope you give this a try. There are some trusting persons who would pay an advance to fund the project out. The sheer amount of time that is required is a big mental barrier to getting started. In my mind the start up funds is not the issue, the difficulty is finding the time to do the job right. The consideration that you might have to make dozens of heads to break even is another barrier.

After you get the head done, then you can start on a new alloy block

Are you just toying with us?
OK, I'll bite. What type of configuration have you been thinking about? Hemi head? Canted valves? Overhead cam(s)?

_________________
'70 Cuda AAR
'74 Duster 360
'79 MagnumGT
'79 Chrysler 300

I don't believe Doug toys with anybody, especially when it comes to the world of Slant Sixes...

I believe that money is ultimately the issue here, and most anybody into Slants, even the most hardcore, cannot devote $20k of "extra cash" to startup and then not know how much they will get back. A group effort of large ($1-3k) deposits might be a way around this, but we cannot expect one person to front this thing.

It would be very cool if we could get this rolling, and time and effort is definitely a big factor, of course.

Lou

_________________
Home of Slant6-powered fun machines since 1988

$20,000 is very reasonable! I would have estimated the costs of at least $100,000 for a head that is of commercial quality. If you have a lot of time to devote to the project and some experience with casting complex objects, then it's a lot cheaper to make a few heads with some old school methods. It's a lot of time to develop a head that can be reproduced in high quality. Making patterns from ordinary wood and glue is an ancient craft, but doing this over and over until the results are consistently like a factory piece is a lot of work! Someone with a bandsaw and excellent woodworking skills can make casting patterns. A cylinder head is one of the most complicated parts to cast because of the ports and water jacket require several cores, which are usually made of sand which can shift and mess things up. It's very tricky to do right, which is why you might have to do it over and over until the flaws are worked out of the process. If you can produce good results with the initial patterns the costs decline significantly.

I'm sure Doug can do it!

To me, there is a really limited market for an aluminum head, especially since you'd have to reach some kind of agreement on what it should do. If you make it a decent street head, it is of no use to a racer. If you make it a race head, it's worthless on the street. Right now, there are maybe 6 cars in the country that have exceeded the limit of what you can do with an iron head. How many people will actually pony up for an aluminum street head? Will 20K really be enough startup cash to get you through all the first run bugs? Will the exhaust seats walk around like the Edelbrock small block heads did at first? We discuss this topic every winter, and so far no one has popped for the 20K. I spend money like water and I'd still have a hard time biting the bullet on this deal. I'd buy a proven head though. Pretty good of me, huh? Let someone else do the leg work and stand in line for the finished product.

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Official Cookie and Mater Tormentor.

I know someone who has made several "one off" head castings. Homebrew casting could require considerably more custom mill work than most commercial heads require. Economical castings can be produced in a backyard foundry, but the mill work is high dollar.

The only way I'd consider a custom head is where a basic configuration for a common production head could be used "as is" so that existing valve train hardware could be borrowed for more reasonable economies. Using a known design can save headaches in engineering the thing. If you section a production head you can see how they designed the water cores and other details, and copy it.

It's too expensive and time consuming for little return for the project except to say that you did
it.