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Posted by David Sherman [216.18.131.33] on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 12:48:01 :
In Reply to: Edmunds aluminum head on eBay posted by Joe Cimoch [68.116.181.98] on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 11:06:58 :
I'm not sure how you'd do the water passages with CNC, and the price of an aluminum billet that is probably as much as the heads are selling for. However, it might be reasonable to reproduce them by sand casting, which is probably how the originals were made. When I worked for a bar code scanner company, we had some heavy-duty industrial units with sand-cast aluminum housings. There was a small local company that made them, and the process was similar to cast iron except easier because of the lower temperatures. It was great for low-volume production because the tooling was cheap. If there was really a market for a quantity of these, a guy with a CNC could have a foundry make the rough castings, and it wouldn't take much to finish them off with the CNC mill. The biggest problem, I think, might be getting the metallurgy right. You'd need good quality homgeneous casings of the right alloy with no blows or other defects. It would be a tougher requirement than our scanner housings.
I tend to agree with manny that there's probably no practical advantage on a 230, unlike the old flat-head Ford V8s, but we don't generally run the 230s for their practicality anyway.
I don't think the dissimilar metals would be an issue, though. We already have a copper head gasket and a brass radiator, both of which are very dissimilar to cast iron, but if the coolant is kept fresh, they don't corrode. We even have an aluminum bypass outlet, and it doesn't cause corrosion problems either. Differential expansion is obviously going to be more, which means the head gasket has to maintain a sliding seal to some extent. I don't know if that would make it more prone to leaks or not. And it would be easier to strip out a spark plug or thermostat housing hole.
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