cleaning up the slant six head
I'd love to see some one like Edelbrock develop an aluminum head for the 225 with a modern ~9:1 CR combustion chamber and ports that will support 6500 RPM, even if they have to move the ports & rocker cover gasket rail up to do it. Put enough meat in the head gasket deck to allow cutting it to 11:1 CR and enough meat around the ports so that some guys could get a little crazy. Oh, and an undrilled EFI injector boss on the flat of the head above each intake for pishta. I'd buy one if the economy of scale is remotely close to there, say a bare head for ~$600. Something like that, out of the box, would make my 170 scream!!!
Listen, the 170's scream with the ORIGINAL head... They LOVE RPM!!! There was a guy named Pete McNicoll, who was one of the original Ramchargers (a team of Mopar factory engineers who excelled at drag racing,) who put a 170 into a '40 Willys coupe and ran it in the Gas Coupe and Sedan class that NHRA had for six cylinders back in the early sixties. It had a cast iron head on it (probably ported, with bigger valves,) and he took it to the Nationals at Indy. It was unbeatable. He ran 14-seconds flat at about 100 mph, eclipsing the performances of all the other sixes by a W-I-D-E margin!
That class was run by dividing the car's weight by its cubic inches, so it was all about specific output (cubic inches divided into the weight.)
A 170 slant six is virtually unbeatable in that type of racing. Nothing else comes close...
HOWEVER, this rant of mine is not about 170's because they are not big enough (cubic-inch-wise) to pull a 3,400-pound A-Body through the quarter-mile quickly enough to give the V8 cars' drivers the hives...
THAT is where the turbo 225's come in...
Unfortunately, the way I see it (and, remember, this is just MY opinion, nothing more,) no matter if you started from scratch with a clean sheet of paper, you'd never be able to design a slant six head that would make that 225 into a two-horsepower-per-cubic-inch motor, unless, you canted the valves, hemi-style, to get more room for bigger valve heads. With a true wedge design, there us just not enough room to do it.
A 4-valve-per-cylinder design could do it, easily (think Toyota Supra), but the valve-train complications, alone, would probably make that project un-workable. Think of the rockers and push-rods... unless you made it a SOHC or DOHC design... $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
The short answer to all of this is a hairdyer... It's so obvious to me, but then I'm an idiot... just ask my wife... :angry3:
Thanks for listening...
