Speedmaster, Edelbrock LA, or magnum cylinder head MILLING LIMITS & common Milling Optimization

Newbomb Turk said

You can remove .125 off a passenger car block. You can remove about .200 from an X block. An R block or Ritter can take .300 plus off.

I’m begging you to NOT buy a KB piston for anything. The ring package is just junk. Saving money on those pistons is a bad way to save.

A 5/64 ring package is obsolete. If they would just use a 1/16 ring pack it would be different. But they will not do it.

Really they should all have an .0394 ring package (1 millimeter) but that would be asking them to move from the horse and buggy era to the ballistic missile era in one step. It just won’t happen.

There is nothing wrong with those pistons other than that garbage ring pack.

At any rate, the block should be machined because it’s not flat, unless it’s already been done.

I’m not a fan of milling the hell out of a head for compression.

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I can run H116cp hypereutectic pistons in 360, but they require even more milling. They are heavier, Rusty likes them.

I have not found a comparable hyper piston to KB-167 for the 318. There is merit to your views on KB. I have had a cast piston break apart in a 73 340 and simply replaced the piston and ring while cleaning up the bore with a home, changing the oil, a scraping off aluminum shreds and chunks from the bore and combustion chamber-I don’t think that the hypereutectic pistons would have given me as good of recovery (piston broke apart from the lean condition of the 600?cfm 4160 feeding 100mph driving with a coolant leak.

At least with forged, the bearings will probably fail from detonation before the pistons do.

Most 318 pistons are even lower compression until one eclipses $650-$700++ for the several forged options, all with 1.8 compression height as far as I can tell.
I did consider the DSS piston and ring set, they have the reduced ring thickness that you and yellow-?dart? Talk about.