The heart of any competition car! Here's the final version with the triples. Looks great, runs good, starts immediately, sounds wonderful: what a sweetheart. This block is an '49 8BA acquired disassembled years ago, with all of this in mind. It only had three cracks in the deck, which were repaired, and one liner installed.The engine that came in the car was a virtual match. This allowed me to build the new motor first then swap everything over, minimizing down time, and I still have a good rebuildable core under the workbench.
Induction: 3 '97's, Offy intake, Offy 400 heads with center water outlets and reworked transfer area (that took forever). The block has a mild relief and porting work throughout, especially the end exhaust ports where they come out of the block. Timing is by Isky Max 1 cam profile reground on stock core, with adjustible lifters, Lincoln springs, Ford valves, and aluminum timing gears. Compression is about 9:1.
Spark comes from an ancient Mallory dual point converted to use 289 Ford points (not by me). Fuel pressure is electric with Holley regulator. The water pumps are pick-up. The generator is converted to 12v by replacing the armature with an NOS high output unit. 35 amps is pretty good for a 'dynamo'!
Crank is Ford, displacement is 268 ci.: don't really need a stroker with such a light car. The big addition is the balancing: we use a great shop that goes to extremes, and we get a very smooth, high revving engine out of it. The headers are Red's I believe, they came on the car but they were new. Exhaust is through Twin Smithys, first with tail pipes, and now with short dumps ahead of the rear axles. Tried it with straight pipes and tips, which was totally hot but didn't have that sweet sound, just too raspy to my ear.
I'm guessing this engine is running about 150-160hp with all 3 open. It has tremendous top end pull, and you have to keep an eye on the tach! These choices were worked out over a one year period doing homework and research, including lots of e-mail time at the "Flatheaders Online" website. I had a lot of good advice.
The only 'problem' with it is that the exterior parts are all way 1949. That's not a problem for a fun or show rod, but for Greatrace it kills almost 10 years of age factor, enough to bump you 2-3 spots at the end of the day. It's also a fairly common look now, since the heads, manifolds, carbs, etc. are all available new. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
So after building my dream engine, the one I had spent years building in my head, here I am all set to change it! Typical damn hot rodder, never satisfied. I'm going to make it look like a lakes engine circa 1940. It won't be as pretty, but if I'm careful I shouldn't lose much power and I'll have something just a little more unique. Besides, I can always bolt everything back up just the way I had it before, this is not a one way trip! And I do have that engine still under the workbench: hmmmm...

This shows the mild grinding through the transfer area. The theory here is to improve breathing while still keeping the compression up. The top of the cylinder and the entire area has no sharp edges to collect carbon or to act as ignition points. The deck at the cylinder edge is dropped just a bit. The outline of the big bore head gasket can clearly be seen. I also numbered the valves and ports since they are both triple cut and hand lapped (I have my own valve grinder; it's an antique but a good one).

Comparison of the stock combustion chamber and the modified version. The idea here is to improve breathing at the top end by making the transfer area wider and deeper. You can see the outline of the cylinder and head gasket, which I kept fresh through the process.
Many times the aftermarket high compression heads added material to the combustion chamber, since they couldn't mill the head due to valve lift and piston clearance. So you could get high compression and better valve clearance, but at the cost of flow. There are a lot of folks who believe that flow is better than compression at the top end, and some who think the opposite. So this is my compromise. The rebore increases the compression ratio anyway, so removing material is ok as long as you watch it. Using my graduated cylinder I checked the chamber cc's all along the way, and hopefully helped the flow while keeping compression up. The rest of the chamber, including the roof, was smoothed out using wet or dry sandpaper and polishing tips, and the area around the spark plug was relieved and tapered, again to promote flame travel and reduce pre ignition.
That's the theory anyway. All's I knows is that it starts fast, idles smooth, and pulls like a train to high rpm's. Runs fine on regular, too. I guess it worked.
After all of that work I'm pulling those beautiful heads off in exchange for cast iron??? Yep. First, the Offy heads are definitely post war, no doubt about it. Second, the stock '40 heads have good flow characteristics through the transfer area, and require a lot less reworking than the high compression aluminum stuff. Plus, grinding stones work a lot easier than air files, which have to be cleaned constantly. The old timers all say that they made good power with stock heads. I don't think I'll lose much power, but I do hate adding the additional weight. I'm also hoping that the bright red paint on the heads against a flat black body will be a nice contrast and still look good. And of course it's all reversible should I come to my senses. Still, it will be interesting to see if if feels or sounds any different.