School me on W2 heads.
I had a love/hate relationship with the W5. We had them CnC ported on a group buy many moons ago, and as luck would have it, ours leaked on the #3 intake short turn. We discovered this about 50 passes into a very strong running combo. We sent the head back to the business that had them ported and it returned epoxied. Put the mill back together and 150 passes in the epoxy came out. At that point we sought out to do the repair correctly and found a guy in Iowa that has brought many Brodix sprint car heads "back from the dead" as the builder I was talking to stated. I had a junk W5 that we cut on a band saw and sent the section along with the head to the repair shop. He had the head for three months before calling saying he gave up. The head would literally crumble when he attempted to weld on it.... In the mean time we put our lesser ported set of W5's on the short block hoping to get some racing it. It went two passes and kicked the #3 rod. We later figured the loss of the epoxy probably hydro'ed the cylinder and hurt the rod causing it's early exit after the installation of the other set of heads. At that point, we licked our wounds, and sold all the W5 stuff we had.
it was interesting.... these were the newer "blue plug" castings that most say are the ones to own, but so was our other set and the finish of our other set was much different. I was banking on the new Ebrock heads coming out as we still had a couple 340 blocks to play with, but we got sick of waiting and bought a W8 top end and the snow ball rolled straight to hell from there. I will say, the W8 heads are a very nice high quality piece.
For the record my dad was wheeling the car at the time and was short shifting running 10ohs as the car wasn't legal to go 9's. We upped the shift light to 6800 and the car ran some 9.8's at 137. 4:30 gear and too tight of converter was killing some ET. I'm sure we could have gotten some mid to high 9.6s out of it. This was on a stock 340 block, filled with aftermarket 2 bolt steel caps. If the quality of the material would have been worth a hoot we'd still be running them. We actually bought the second set to start building a duplicate engine to have as a spare. Never got that far.
I had a love/hate relationship with the W5. We had them CnC ported on a group buy many moons ago, and as luck would have it, ours leaked on the #3 intake short turn. We discovered this about 50 passes into a very strong running combo. We sent the head back to the business that had them ported and it returned epoxied. Put the mill back together and 150 passes in the epoxy came out. At that point we sought out to do the repair correctly and found a guy in Iowa that has brought many Brodix sprint car heads "back from the dead" as the builder I was talking to stated. I had a junk W5 that we cut on a band saw and sent the section along with the head to the repair shop. He had the head for three months before calling saying he gave up. The head would literally crumble when he attempted to weld on it.... In the mean time we put our lesser ported set of W5's on the short block hoping to get some racing it. It went two passes and kicked the #3 rod. We later figured the loss of the epoxy probably hydro'ed the cylinder and hurt the rod causing it's early exit after the installation of the other set of heads. At that point, we licked our wounds, and sold all the W5 stuff we had.
it was interesting.... these were the newer "blue plug" castings that most say are the ones to own, but so was our other set and the finish of our other set was much different. I was banking on the new Ebrock heads coming out as we still had a couple 340 blocks to play with, but we got sick of waiting and bought a W8 top end and the snow ball rolled straight to hell from there. I will say, the W8 heads are a very nice high quality piece.
For the record my dad was wheeling the car at the time and was short shifting running 10ohs as the car wasn't legal to go 9's. We upped the shift light to 6800 and the car ran some 9.8's at 137. 4:30 gear and too tight of converter was killing some ET. I'm sure we could have gotten some mid to high 9.6s out of it. This was on a stock 340 block, filled with aftermarket 2 bolt steel caps. If the quality of the material would have been worth a hoot we'd still be running them. We actually bought the second set to start building a duplicate engine to have as a spare. Never got that far.
