Inliners International Forums General Discussion Hi Performance Jeep engine with a Ford head

I have started on a project that is to put a 351 Cleveland head on a stroked 2.5 4 cylinder. The ultimate goal of this is to design a cross flow head for Jeep 6 cylinder engines. The bore spacing is the same and the head bolt holes line up on the intake side. The Jeep 2.5 4 cylinder engine and the Jeep 4.0 and 258 have a lot in common with each other. If anyone is interested in this type of stuff I can continue to post here.
Jim Ford
Highway 101 Rod and Custom

Jim,
You may already know this:
The Mercruiser 470 had a Ford big block head on a 4 cylinder of their own design if I understand it right.
From the boating websites it seems to have a sketchy rep for reliability.
May or may not help you.
That's all I know!
But feel free to post what you're doing because some of us will find it interesting

Which Jeep 2.5 are you using? Is it the GM 153. or 151 ? Or the one they developed after the 151 (Iron Duke). I had one of the latter in a Cherokee with a a 5 speed and really liked it. I also had a couple of 4.0 sixes and liked them too. I'd be interested to see where you take this.

The bore spacing is close, but not the same and can be made to work with some machine work. I saw a racer back at our home drag strip in the early 80's that put 351C heads on his Small Block Chevy. Ironically, about 4 years ago I bought a milling machine from a guy on craigslist. When I got to his shop, he had pics of the car on the walls and it turned out he was that racer. But, he performed all the machine work to make the head swap. Blackwater Tom may know him as well since this shop is between us in Murfreesboro,Tn. At that time, there were no aftermarket aluminum heads yet, so that was a little creative to say the least.

There are 4 different Cleveland style heads as you may be aware of. They each probably have different objectives based on your goals and power output you expect. All other SBF cylinder heads can work also, and even aluminum versions of those are available cheap and have as much potential as a Cleveland style head. But the SBF head swap is a good choice and it even is a better fit in the Chevy 4, 6 and V8 blocks, more than trying to put them on the Ford 240/300 blocks which does require the heads to be cut into 6 separate pieces and furnace brazed back together because bore spacing between them is too great and can only be corrected by this method. Interesting build, so please continue!

That car ran out of Mikes Speed Shop in Murfreesboro, TN. It was a Fiat Topolino bodied altered. At one time it ran a clutch turbo transmission. The car was squirrely, but it was fast. It did have reliability problems. As I recall, the actual engine was fairly reliable, it was the related parts that gave problems.

The SBC and G-3 L6 (230, 250, 292 etc.) bore pitch 4.400".
Ford 240, 300 4.480".
Ford SB (Windsor, Cleveland, Boss) 4.380" (inherited from the Y block)
If everything else lines up, partially shrouding the bore with the head casting or the chamber with the deck has been used forever, apparently harmless in the 216, 235, 261.

IDK of anything else very close, more data on my site here: http://victorylibrary.com/mopar/m-table.htm

Yep, that's him, Mike McAdoo. Real nice guy and that Cleveland head swap on a Chevy was very innovative for the time.