HUH I thought the TA 350 aluminum heads WERE the fix If that is the case, I'll "fix" my irons, OR I might ruin 'em Either way, I save thousands of dollars, and I get to do "hands on" which I LOVE to do, and if they perform better, I'll get that warm fuzzy feeling knowing I did it myself I'll run it at the track and report back
Very true! After cancelling my order, I thought "what can I do to my iron heads, what are my options?"
You can't compare those motors to daily drivers. Those motor are not built to run tons of miles, its apples to oranges, and its not uncommon for ppl in those class cars to have twice in a motor what most have in their entire car..........
Hey Ben, Did Mackley end up putting a set of TA heads on his son's car? Force feeding, it should be a rocket.
I don't have much knowledge in casting. As far as head porting work I see it's opening up the runners some, smoothing away rough spots, taking away material around the valve guide, getting into the ports curves and taking away more material with keeping a nice flow etc. Ok the big porters might cut the heads to get better access inside and weld them back up but these 350 heads aren't about that. I guess what i'm asking is why did TA didn't just cast the heads with bigger gains instead of them being close to a lightly ported iron head out of the box? The BBB heads seem to be cast that way. Yes different design but still doable I believe?
So a better flowing initial head casting can't be done. I understand the small bore limitations is big issue but can't they just cast the inners close to what a level 1 porting option is. If its about TA making extra money with their porting option I get it but I thought I read they really don't like investing time in extra port work? I guess my question is more of a casting question. Unless casting them with more inside volume would cause alot of bad casting with the thinner walls and hand or CNC porting is the better way?
I wonder if thats the issue Buick had casting Stage 2 heads I mentioned in a previous post Mike Sr. Said there’s not a lot of wiggle room in the stock head, and they adjusted as much as they could for the aluminum castings. I think the biggest benefit to the aluminum heads is going to a closed chamber, and porting is easier verses grinding iron.
From what I've heard "as cast" the 350 heads are only slightly behind the Rover/TA heads which are derived directly from the V6 heads, which have the reputation of being outstanding. Flow numbers that I've seen seem to back this up. If building for the street I'd suspect that many builders would not want to port the heads as it's entirely possible to have too much of a good thing. For racing, yes of course you would. Jim
There are a lot of reasons why the TA heads didn’t perform as well as we had hoped out of the box. 1. Yes there are huge design restrains with creating a head like this while allowing it to work with the current headers and aftermarket intakes. If both of those accommodations were not made then it would open up the performance in a HUGE way. I would have gladly re done new turbo headers or had another custom intake made to get a better head. 95% of head buyers would not agree. 2. Research and development costs and time. If there was more time and budget then additional refinement could have been made to the current casting. It’s easy for me to say that additional R&D would be worth the investment however I’m not the one paying for that substantial cost so it’s not up to me to say if TA should have spent the extra time and money on this. In short if the first set of heads had been sent to my guy then he could have returned them fixed and they could have cast them as such. I know they spent a ton on these heads and the result is a good step forward vs the limits of the iron heads which needed thousands invested and still very prone to cracking once fully ported. That’s the issue Bill Mah had, porting a great number of iron heads and having them fail from overporting or casting irregularities. I give TA a 8/10 rating on these heads, they did amazing investing in a head that will likely never sell enough to pay for the investment made. This brings us full circle to the current situation where I don’t blame TA for not changing the intake and header design, they would sell even less in that case. They are already a poor selling product, not opinion it’s a fact. Huge props to TA for doing this even if it was a poor financial decision. For a guy like me I’m not too concerned, my pro head porter is taking this platform and going next level with it. All I’m really concerned with is the potential of the head, not the out of the box performance.
Good points. TA made these heads and the SP intake great for both street and strip. They aren’t setup as a race head out of the box. They have huge potential to be a great race head with enough time, money and effort.
The TA heads out of the box will outperform your ported iron heads. As you know it’s currently over $1000 to setup a set of iron heads with oversized valves and good precision valve jobs. Next is porting, any home porting without flow testing is going to be a shot on the dark whether it helps or hurts the performance. Investing $1000+ into porting a set of heads using a pro to do that was definitely worth it before we had the alum head option. That was $2000 to do iron heads. Now that we have the better head to work with it’s throwing good money after bad working with the iron head. The only exception is a racing class requirement to use the iron head. Home porting an iron head for fun is cool but it isn’t going to give a 50-80 HP gain. When does it get to the point where spending thousands on the irons is a better investment vs buying to better alum head that can be made into an amazing power adder? My engines are on the stands, fresh and ready to test once I’ve got both the alum heads abs irons to the maximum potential available. I’m in no rush and I don’t care to promote the product that’s up to TA.
my heads are 15yrs old. done by 'el paso jim'. cost me over 2k then. i looked at the alum heads and they just didn't make me warm and fuzzy with using a blower. probably good for n/a. but my iron will continue to live until kbb has show's me what he has up his sleeve. btw, when is that book coming out. i leave all my 350 reading material on the web for everybody. no waiting and no charge.
"how I screwed up telling TA on how to build their heads" I read that book. another 20,000$ engine, now that is entertainment Looks like someone has just shot those 350 alum heads to the ground, that is the way I read it.
