In hot rodding’s version of Never-Never Land, the Lost Boys all drive ultrahot street cars fitted with all the trick parts since, hey, this is a fantasy. Price is no object as long as they beat ol’ Captain Hook to the next street light. Unfortunately, we live in Reality Check, USA, where a dollar is tough to come by and harder to hang onto than a screwdriver dipped in Slick 50. The bottom line is horsepower costs money.
We decided to take a look at a couple of different ways to make power with cylinder heads. Hot Rod published a story a few years ago on how to port your own cylinder heads (“Port-A-Ble Power,” May ’91). The only detail that story left out was how much power those home-brewed modifications were worth. This story will fill that information gap plus compare that power to a set of off-the-shelf aluminum heads from Edelbrock.
We knew our backyard-ported iron heads would make more power than a set of stock heads, and we were right. We thought our massaged iron heads would be close in power to a set of aftermarket aluminum heads, but we were wrong. We also figured the iron heads would be cheaper than Edelbrock’s slick alloy heads. We were right, but only by the slightest of margins. Which brings us back to real-world hot rodding. Sometimes, things are not as they appear.
Our power approach this time is a little different because we will evaluate the power we made against the money we spent. It’s not surprising that if you spend a little more money, and spend it wisely, the cost of making that extra power goes down! Stick with us now. What that means is that an intelligently spent dollar buys more power. Think of this as a blend of Econ 101 with a great auto mechanics class. There’s also a test, but it has to do with physics stuff like acceleration and getting from here to there in a shorter amount of time. Trust us, you’ll like it.
