The first set of Stage 5 were made from a set of TA Stage 2SE. Filled the floors with plastic and started porting. I did it this way first because anyone could do it with the parts I sell. The second set which are still being used on the car are the same casting, I just hand cut the floors off the intake cores at the foundry so it left more aluminum in the intake ports. This way I didn't have to fill so much with plastic. Valve locations are the same as the Stage 3 & 4. Intake pushrod's moved over. I also made the bar mounted rocker set up myself on my hand mill. By making that set up I was able to put a little longer valve in the head. Last year 2013 after BG I sent the heads to a Scott Jennings that Bruce Kent & Dave Benisek introduced me to. Dave thought that would help take some work of my plate to get the car back together. Scott Jennings was the worst thing that happen to this project. The heads were horrible, one intake port touched 420, others down to 350 at a cost of over $3000 and lots of pain. They went just a bit over 400 when sent to Scott. Bruce felt very bad about this and offered to try and make them equal. Bruce felt because we had one good intake & one good exhaust port they would be able to just match bad to the good. Bruce has a friend, Mikio which is pretty talented and he felt they could do that. It was not easy and it took a lot of Bruce's spare time, but they are very close to each other now. I never had time to check the final work on the bench. There was an area that was leaking water in one of the intake ports which took a bit of work to get it stopped. Anyway my hats off to Bruce Kent for seeing it through, fine job my friend, thank you. We both in a funny way enjoyed and hated the process, but never gave up. Those heads coupled to the rest of the bomb surprised even me. I figured it could make record power by all my calculations, but on the other hand, I didn't think it really would. Engine 560cu, 13.45:1 warm, Cam is ground by "Schneider Cams" who does all our cams, pistons are JE, rods are GRP, crank is from Crower 4.400. No top secret stuff, just a different view of solving a problem.
Good job Mike! The car looked, sounded and performed very well.... as usual. Hat's off to all the new Tomahawk block guys out there! Some big numbers are here already and I'm sure they'll get bigger!! Wish I had more time and coin to "play along". Steve
Thanks for the praise Mike. I really did enjoy the journey on these heads and wished that I had more time with them. To my knowledge these were the only set in existence so they were treated like gold. I'm not a very patient student so to watch Mikio work and work on these to get all cross sections the same was painful and the gains were minimal but it was laying the foundation for what was to come. For the record, Scott was strictly Dave's idea. I didn't even know he had them until you were trying to get them back. When they left, at .800" lift, my worse port was 10 cfm better than the previous persons best port with 2.5% variation between them. I would have closed that gap but ran out of time. I hope you do cast more of these. I know there is another 10-15 peak cfm at higher lifts without any loss in low or medium lifts just by going to a smaller valve and or changing seat angles. This would be a huge leap in performance for us.
I'm curious on why you filled the floor in for? Did you essentially raise the intake port and reshaped it? I don't want you to get in great detail ok?
