318 head porting for the average joe

volaredon said
Are they or aren't they worth a $#!t? . . . Are they worth the effort to spend a Saturday afternoon swapping out?. . . this will never be a race car, I never wanted it to be. but I want to wake it up a bit. . . . just a cruiser, and sometime back n forth to work vehicle in nice weather.

Parts in and of themselves are not "the ****" or "not worth a ****." All parts assessment needs context. Unfortunately, with a stock or very mild 318 in a nearly 4,000 lb '78 Fury it will take a heck of a lot more for you to feel the engine "wake up" than simply swapping one set of stock smogger heads for a set of higher-compression, heart-shaped chamber stock smogger heads with the same flow. In your case, the 302 heads are "not worth a ****." However, take those same heads and put them on a 318 in a 1964 Dart coupe and you might feel a slight improvement, but likely less feel than you would see some numbers change slightly on a time slip. In that application, the heads might be considered "somewhat worth a ****." Port them and match them with pistons, cam, intake, carb, converter, gears, and tires in that '64 Dart and they would be considered "the ****." Performance magazines and parts catalogues too often convince people that swapping out a single part equals noticeable gains, like the K&N filter craze of magically adding 35HP to a 2010 2500 over a factory paper filter; while the proud owner who just dropped big bucks on his unnecessary K&N filter will brag to his buddies that his filter is "the ****," even if that amount of HP gain were realistic in a stock application it wouldn't make a lick of noticeable difference in his 6,000 lb truck.