Budget cylinder heads for a 318

If your sticking with stock heads, 3.23’s, it’ll be a little harder to achieve your goal. Ported 318 heads do very well except that’s an iron head that is hard to find a ported to do the labor intensive work and a rebuild. The aluminum head becomes more ch more attractive with lighter weight and better flow as cast.

The Speed Master/Pro Comp heads are a good match. With 20cc’s more to the TF heads, the very important velocity through the head may start to become an issue. “MAY” being the key word. I’m becomes build dependent from this point on. And it just isn’t the engine, it is the whole drive train. 3./3’s do not release the power as quickly as 4.10’s and up. For that gear ratio, a quick stop light to light tire burner is a not really going to happen.

The aluminum cylinder head at the 170cc area and a cam duration around 220 to 228 area would be very good.
Get a good torque converter and up the compression ratio on the engine and you’ll be pretty good
Yeah I think it would be a good experiment on a 318. Get some factory magnum heads. Indy will bowl blend and port match for $250 per head then add $150 per head for a valve job. At that point it's sitting around $800 for the pair then add a couple hundred for springs and retainers. So $1000 into stock magnum heads maybe flow about 230-240 when done. Plus whatever you pay for the stock magnum heads. At the current price of speedmaster heads the price is fairly equal. And for a 300-350 hp 318 my personal choice is use factory rockers for magnum. Then whatever a person chooses for rockers on the speedmaster.

Then take the same engine and swap heads and dyno those babies! Be a good group project for the fabo crowd. That would get everyone's mind off of world events for a few moments and we would learn something to boot