Dave, a friend of mine, runs a nice hot Hemi 265 in a drag car his wife drives. While he is currently putting together a 440 to go into another car (a gutted PT Cruiser), he is still keen on developing the Hemi 6.
There is an aftermarket alloy head available for the Hemi, but it's naturally enough quite expensive. So Dave has given the go-ahead for my nephew, Ben Simpson, to start on a project to see what he can get out of a regular head. The purpose of this is that it might be possible to actually do better than the aftermarket head and save some of the expense.
Tomorrow I deliver a head to Ben for comparison. He has two 265 heads there already, so now he'll have three to inspect to see how the cores might have moved and to determine the best one to start work on.
He has some good facilities at his disposal, including a flow bench (two, actually...) and all the gear needed to do the job properly. He does, after all, do this stuff for a living.
What I'll try to do is put up a photographic record of the work in progress here and report from time to time on how it's going.
It's not going to be done in a rush, so this thread might still be going in a year's time.
The Hemi 6 is, of course, the US-designed and Australian-built inline six that replaced the slant 6 in Australia in 1970/71. It was built for about ten years in 215, 245 and 265 sizes, all with the same stroke (3.52", 3.76" and 3.91" bores, respectively, stroke 3.68").
They were built to upgrade the Valiant profile in a market where the inline six had been ruling the roost for twenty years. The Valiant was Chrysler's biggest seller in this market as it was a similar size to the most popular cars here, the Holden and Falcon. The 245 was also made in a truck version while the 265 went seriously racing in production cars wearing three dual choke Weber carbies and producing over 300bhp at the flywheel.
Last edited by Ray Bell; 09/17/09 10:34 AM. Reason: Error in spec
